


The Everthere

by cenotaphs



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, but most of it will be offstage so to speak, i'm far more interested in the c part of h/c, lots of violence and torture here folks, the rape warning is for a flashback blurb that talks about it but doesn't show it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:07:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 49,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25851052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cenotaphs/pseuds/cenotaphs
Summary: Joe vanishes and is eventually found. It is as simple and as terrible as that.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 251
Kudos: 813





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very soft opening for a bruiser of a story. I'm definitely one of those hurt-em-if-you-love-em writers, and I adore Joe and Nicky. Forgive me. 
> 
> I'm blown away by the warmth and enthusiasm of this fandom and I've only been here for like two days. Thanks.

> When I am nothing, I am going to miss the groceries here.  
>  Diana Khoi Nguyen

* * *

Joe got introspective after sex, at least in the times he didn’t pass out immediately.

“Do you ever thing this might actually be our afterlife?”

Nicky was always introspective, really, so he enjoyed these quiet moments. He enjoyed humming a soft noise to encourage Joe to explain in more detail, even as he trailed his fingers up and down Joe’s arm as Joe’s hand explored his chest absently.

“Maybe our first death was a true death, but we weren’t pure enough or evil enough to make it into a level of heaven or hell, and so we were sent back until we became either good or evil.”

An interesting thought. One they had talked out before, some century or another, long after the differences in religious theories and the concepts of heaven and hell held much meaning to them. But there weren’t many conversations to be had for the first time after nine hundred years, and it didn’t make the conversations less interesting.

“And Andy? Booker? Quynh? Are they the only other mediocre souls in all this time?”

Joe huffed in feigned offense, never lifting his eyes from Nicky’s skin. “I never called my soul mediocre. And maybe. Or maybe there are countless worlds like this one, and in each one some small group of souls gets to live over and over again.”

“You’re threatening to move into theoretical physics here, my heart.”

“You like physics.”

Nicky did like physics, in a philosophical sense. Still. “I do not like physics while your seed is still drying on my skin.”

Joe laughed, pressed his lips to Nicky’s sweaty chest. He let his head rest there, cheek against skin, and Nicky stroked carefully through his thick curls.

Nicky looked up at the dark ceiling, content with Joe’s weight on him this way. “Endless lives are complicated enough, I don’t think I could handle endless worlds at the same time.”

“True enough.” Joe’s voice was getting thicker with sleep. “But if there are endless worlds with endless possibilities, I think we got the best one.”

Nicky smiled into the dark.

* * *

Things happened in cycles. What started had to stop eventually, to lead to new beginnings that would soon also end. Nine hundred years of life on this earth had taught Nicky about those cycles, though they were usually only spotted with the value of hindsight. It had taught him not to take any of the changes in the world around them very seriously, or to depend on anything too much. Because everything was temporary.

He tended to chart his history by those cycles. Places he and Joe had lived, languages they had spoken near exclusively for decades before the language itself died around them. (The English-dominant cycle they were still in was proving longer-lived than he first predicted, which Joe credited to the ravages of colonialism. Nicky simply found it annoying - it was not a beautiful language to listen to - and he went to great lengths to at least keep his accent strong.)

There were emotional phases, more for Nicky than for Joe. The cycles between thinking of their immortality as a blessing and thinking of it as a curse were ever-repeating. The cycles between faith in God and certainty that nothing meant anything, those also followed on each other’s footsteps without end.

The one constant – besides change, of course – was Joe.

But even their relationship tended to cycle, though in smaller ways. They had their voracious phases, touching constantly, sitting in each other’s laps like newlyweds, and taking any excuse to murmur affection or duck back to the nearest bedroom.

Nicky greatly enjoyed those phases.

But if he were being honest, this current phase they were in warmed him far more. He suspected that was something no one younger than nine hundred would understand.

This phase was not especially romantic, after all. Nicky and Joe could go entire days without speaking more than a few words to each other. They were happy to keep their space from each other. Joe didn’t dissolve into poetic speeches boasting of Nicky’s perfection, Nicky didn’t lose long minutes simply gazing at Joe’s adored and long-memorized face.

These phases were far more palatable to Andy, to Booker when he’d still been with them. Nile first met them in one of those phases. She had yet to see what Andy called their Insufferable Hedonism for herself.

What people who were not Joe and Nicky didn’t understand about spending nine hundred years side by side with the one they loved was that they were simply too essential to each other to have to show it, even to each other.

They didn’t sit side by side, but neither sat until the other was there. They didn’t gush at each other in long form poetry, they only _looked_ at each other. Briefly, but often.

Joe was as familiar to Nicky as breath in his lungs, as essential to his day to day life as gravity, as the rotation of the earth. That didn’t need to be shown or talked about. He didn’t need to touch Joe constantly, he didn’t need to have so much as a conversation with him. He didn’t need to remind himself how lucky he was, how much he loved this man.

It was oxygen. It was ever-present and understood.

From the outside, Nicky supposed that might come across as uncaring. In reality, it was exactly the opposite. He would walk past Joe seated in conversation with one of their remarkable family, he would lay fingertips light on Joe’s shoulder without a thought as he went, and neither of them would really even notice the gesture. Because it was breathing, and breathing wasn’t something one had to think about.

This phase, this quiet and comfortable phase, lasted longer and longer for them.

Usually some particularly brutal fight or death would knock them out of it for a time. Sometimes it was sheer lust that would infect one of them, drag them behind closed doors, and leave them unable to keep hands off each other for weeks at a time.

Those phases were passionate and loud, full of lust and the biggest smiles, the deepest laughs. Hand feeding each other strawberry and mango and sipping champagne as they went a month solid without ever putting on clothes. Whispering extravagant promises into each other’s skin. Using each other as alter to worship the old God they had both otherwise grown apart from.

Those were the times it was hard to go to work, hard to be around others. Those were the times Andy found them insufferable. Those were the times, Nicky suspected, that led to Booker resenting them so much.

Then those times passed, and for a while, years or decades, they fell back into that quietly comfortable phase of being each other’s air. They still fucked, of course, still adored each other. If driven to it they would still, as Joe had proven so recently, blast others with grand romantic speeches about their love. But the main way they showed their devotion was in simple glances a hundred times a day. A moment’s eye contact, a brush of fingertips on a shoulder.

Quiet, old, deep. From outside, Nicky suspected they might look rather bland. He didn’t much care. He and his Yusuf had the remarkable claim to being the only living lovers in the history of the world to share centuries together, and so he and Joe alone could judge how it should look after all this time.

Though their lives were necessarily violent, only occasionally had they been separated. Only for short times, barring a few voluntary separations centuries ago, when they were first learning this new life and what they meant to each other in it.

And so what Nicky didn’t know, and never dared to think about, was what might happen if one day he tried to draw a breath and his air was no longer there.

* * *

What Joe and Nicky never told anyone, as much as they liked retelling their first violent meeting, was the details of the last death on that battle field before they lowered their swords for good.

Nicolò, having died and returned a dozen times, had woken one more time to search out his also-dead opponent. Spotting him stirring, Nicolò felt a despair so strong that he felt like he had no choice in how to respond to it. Even as his fierce Muslim foe pushed to his feet and grasped his own sword, Nicolò, knowing how mortal was the sin even as he committed it, met the man’s dark eyes from meters away and plunged his sword into his own gut.

He heard his enemy cry out, and Nicolò died at his own hand.

But it made no difference. Still his eyes reopened. Still God rejected his soul.

He had no strength left to look around, to get to his feet, to live. He sobbed harshly into the blood-stained dirt, screaming in his abandonment.

His enemy approached him finally, loud footsteps at his side. When Nicolò looked up, the man gazed down at him with a terrible grief in his own eyes. He held out a hand. His sword was far behind him, left in the mud and grass.

Nicolò took his offered hand. He never let it go again.

* * *

They left Booker standing alone on the rocks watching the Thames and they headed southeast. There was a small safe house in the green wilds of Cornwall, and the weather was perfect to spend some weeks there. It was near to the ocean but not so close to worry about random tourists, and a small village was in walking distance. Nothing fancy, but there was a small grocer, a handful of restaurants.

They introduced Nile to pasties, the greasy marvels of chip shops, the long wandering paths that used to be mining trails, but now were mainly used by locals to walk their dogs and take in the sprawling green hills and valleys.

They would introduce Nile to the entire world, and Nicky was looking forward to it. He could tell from her guarded manner that she didn’t yet believe that her endless life wouldn’t be filled with equally endless violence.

There would be violence, Nicky told her one night early on. Too much of it. But between fights they had time to marvel at the world. To remind themselves why the fights, and the many lives, were worth it.

The safe house was small, and close enough to its neighbors that they constantly heard the clucks of the chickens that lived in the backyard to their right. And so Nicky and Joe were content to be low key together, to use their bed only for sleeping.

Soon they planned to take a week, go to Wales, spend time alone together while still being close to the others. But there was no hurry. Their family had changed greatly, and that change was worth experiencing for a while.

Andy seemed to enjoy the calmness of the break. She spent most of her time with Nile, watching her with openly affectionate eyes as she taught Nile all the things that she herself had just lost. Nicky had no worries for Andy anymore. She seemed at peace, more than any time he had ever known her.

It was strange to grieve for her but be so happy for her at the same time.

“Your heart is too big,” Joe told him when they talked about it. “It’s able to feel too many emotions at once. That must be confusing. We have paracetamol, if it hurts your brain?”

Nicky rolled his eyes and pushed him away, smiling. “If it’s true than it’s your fault. I fell in love with my sworn enemy, that might have been enough to split my heart into factions. I’m cursed to never feel simply about anything again.”

Joe grinned at him. In their more carnal phases that would have bought Nicky a few hours on his back. As it was, with their sisters around, Joe simply swatted him in the arm and silently went to refill Nicky’s wine glass before it was quite empty.

Such joys in both, really.

All in all, they took a few weeks. They silently and in one-on-one murmurs with each other mourned the loss of Booker, they helped Andy recover her full strength and started her training more in self-defense than she ever had. They told a captivated Nile stories of the world, past and present, and planned future travels until she was finally excited to be one of them.

They healed.

Then Joe left for a quick errand a few villages away, and never came back.


	2. Chapter 2

Nicky asked him about getting married once, back in the 1970 or 80s when the chatter about gay marriage first started spreading. Asked him, quiet and earnest, if Joe wanted that for them.

Joe looked at Nicky, his gentle, loving face, and laughed out loud.

Luckily Nicky understood the reaction, and broke into a smile of his own.

Marriage had its place in the lives of normal people, no doubt. But the two of them had seen nations and faiths crumble and vanish many times before. These countries around them, the governments, their certifications…they were all so flimsy and temporary.

Where would they get married? They were citizens of the world. What church? They were men of all faiths and none at all. Joe needed no one’s permission and no one’s certification to take Nicky as his husband.

“You do look incredible in a tux, though,” he said later that night in their bed, reconsidering his answer.

“A nice dinner out sometime would be a simpler way to get me dressed up.” The smile was clear in Nicky’s voice.

“Mm.” Joe curled up closer to him, pressing lips idly against the back of Nicky’s neck. In a few weeks, long after Nicky had forgotten this conversation, a nice dinner out and a freshly pressed tux were exactly what Nicky would get.

They wouldn’t be any more officially married for it, but they sure wouldn’t be any less.

* * *

“Mister Jones.”

Joe stopped dead as the door swung closed behind him. He peered at the cluster of people standing between him and the nondescript Renault he was driving.

He was gonna hear about this for decades. Someone getting the jump on him as he left a petrol station, of all places. So incredibly annoying.

Nicky would never let him live it down.

Joe took in the familiar woman, then the men standing behind her. They were conspicuously large and cold-eyed men, all obviously armed but not actively holding weapons. Like Joe himself, the pistol tucked against his spine, knives in both boots.

They were in public, but there weren’t many people inside or driving passed. Still, the openness would complicate things.

He took a sip of the Coca Cola he’d bought inside, regarding the group of them thoughtfully.

“Mister Jones?” the woman said again, looking annoyed at his lack of reaction.

Joe bit back a smile. They had found one of his aliases. No doubt he was supposed to be impressed or intimidated by that. He’d have to burn it, of course. That was sad: Joseph Jones had had quite a life. Ah well, he was getting a little too old to be practical anyway.

He looked her in the eyes, this small woman. “I could have sworn we killed you.”

Kozak, that was her name. The cold-eyed doctor with Nobel prizes in her dreams. She had lost her employer when Merrick died, but obviously she’d found another.

“You will be coming with us,” she answered. "It's not a request."

He smiled easily. “I’m sorry to say I have other plans.”

The men behind her shifted, stirred. Maybe they expected this to go quickly and smoothly. Used to being obeyed. Used to kidnapping innocent immortals from petrol stations.

Shit. Maybe they were a government unit, some secret service or military branch. That would be inconvenient.

She returned smile, thin and humorless. “You might be interested to know that we have your friend already. The Italian. If you want to see him again you’d bett--”

Joe laughed loudly enough to cut her off, genuinely amused at the bluff. “If you wanted me to believe that you would have come to me far bloodier than you are.”

She glared at him, then glanced back at the five men who flanked her. “These men are not inclined to take you peacefully,” she said as she turned back to Joe. “They are not patient. Does this need to get violent?”

Joe sighed. He was holding his coke, a pack of crisps and a flake bar: he tried to indulge in junk food whenever he could without Nicky’s sad eyes around judging his life choices, but they weren’t the most effective weapons. Gunfire would mean attention, which after the month they’d had was not to be encouraged.

He’d fought bigger groups with less than his knives, but not quickly. Really, if they had been smart they would have tailed his car and overtaken him on a less populated stretch of road. They were risking exposure too, this way.

They didn’t seem bothered by the idea. That was concerning.

One of the men, the one at Kozak’s right shoulder, cleared his throat quietly.

Kozak squared her shoulders without looking back. “Mister Jones, I have to ask you to get into the van now.”

He smiled. “Surely you know better than that.”

“Enough,” said the man behind her, his voice low and sharp. A successor to that asshole Keane. “Kill him. We’ll see if the doctor’s word is good.”

Joe tensed, but none of the men moved.

He nearly didn’t catch the tiny red light as it landed on his chest. Sniper. Damn it.

The shot hit him like a punch to the chest and knocked him back half a step.

Two men broke off from the back to come to him, to usher him into their van. But a single shot to the chest was nothing: Joe dropped his food and reached under his shirt to pull his revolver from its holster at his back. It was quick, a well-practiced move hardly hampered by the bullet slowing his heart.

The red light caught him again before he could fire, this time finding his eye and near blinding him in the instant before the silent shot was taken.

Ah, Nicky, he thought to himself right before the bullet drove through his eye and into his brain.

Nicky would be annoyed: they weren’t allowed to die apart.

* * *

“Hey, Nicky. You getting hungry?”

Nicky looked up from his book with a faint smile. ‘Are _you_ hungry’ meant ‘ _I’m_ hungry and you need to cook.’ Nile had learned that trick from Andy rather quickly.

Nile smiled from the doorway to the bedroom with hopeful liquid eyes.

“I will develop an immunity to that look eventually,” he said, marking his place in the novel and setting it aside. “We all learn each other’s tricks sooner or later.”

Andy called out from beyond the hallway. “He’s right. But he’ll cook anyway. It’s his way of showing he _loves_ us.”

Nicky rolled his eyes, standing and stretching a bit, rolling his shoulders out. “Being blatant about your manipulations is still manipulating, Andromache.”

“Manipulations get me fed, Nicolo,” she called back without a hint of apology.

“Shameless,” he said to Nile.

She laughed, leading the way out the door. “What you reading? You’ve been at it all day.”

“ _Divina Commedia._ ”

She whistled. “Dante? Really? That’s light vacation reading for you?”

“Until Bridget Jones writes more diaries it’s what I’m reduced to,” he answered cheerfully.

She laughed.

"'Sono nel terzo cerchio, nel giro della pioggia eterna, maledetta, fredda e pesante,'" he recited to Andy as he passed her.

She didn’t look up from the book of crosswords keeping her occupied on the sofa of the front room. She raised a single particular finger in acknowledgement.

Nile hung back as Nicky moved towards the kitchen. “What’d he say?”

“He’s damning me to hell for greed, if I remember my Inferno.”

Nicky was almost insulted. “ _Gluttony_ , you philistine.”

Nile laughed and dropped on the couch beside Andy. “God, I’ve got to start picking up some of these languages.”

Nicky left them to their talk, moving to the kitchen. He had to turn on the light, and realizing that took him aback. The room had been too dark to see, which meant it was much later than he thought. He tended to lose himself in reading sometimes, but he hadn’t expected the moon to be up and bright in the small kitchen window.

He only made it to the refrigerator before he realized why that was so surprising. He turned and went back to the front room instantly.

“It’s late.”

Andy had set the crosswords aside to talk to Nile – those two were awfully cozy lately – but she looked up at Nicky instantly. “Dinner time. Why? What’s up?”

“Joe.”

Andy frowned, but got to her feet without hesitation. She pulled out her phone. She pushed a button and held it to her ear. “He was going in to Truro?”

Nicky nodded once. “His errands should have taken two hours at most.”

Joe’s mind and attention could wander, but he knew enough to call if he found he’d be much later than expected. Typically he would have called either way, at least texted that he was on his way back.

Andy made a face and lowered her phone. “He’s not answering.”

Nicky accepted that. Joe wasn’t answering. Joe was late, hours late. That was fine.

“His phone.” Nile got to her feet and headed for the table she’d set up her fancy new laptop on. “We can track it.”

“Good.” Nicky crossed to her in a flash, peering over her shoulder as she called up the program she’d installed in all their phones.

Booker had been good with technology, but Nile was giant steps above him. She grew up with it, she knew about applications and programs Booker never might have thought of. It was second nature to her.

It took her about three minutes to call up information in her program. Nicky focused on the screen the entire time, unwilling to get lost in fears, in useless speculation and worry. He didn't need to wonder or worry, he just needed to find Joe. Simple.

“Got him.” She grinned, turning a flat white map on screen into a fuzzy green satellite image with the press of a button. “Looks like he’s just off the road outside Truro. Nothing there but a field.”

“Car accident, maybe. That boy is too distractible.” Andy moved around the front room, grabbing her keys and a jacket.

“He’s not moving,” Nile confirmed, shutting the laptop and grabbing her phone instead. “We better get there before an ambulance does.”

“Mm, I hate dealing with hospitals.” Andy headed for the door. “Nicky.”

He followed her instantly, mind still on that dark splot of green on Nile’s computer, with its small dot that represented Joe.

He had a growing and increasingly bad feeling, and it was already a half an hour’s drive away.

* * *

It was a sad fact of life that unconsciousness could at times be more inconvenient than death.

Death had a set time-frame for recovery, at least. Joe took a sniper’s bullet in the eye and when he woke he knew that at most half an hour had gone by. But then, to keep him down, one of his captors had injected him with something and sent him back into darkness.

And now he woke up uncertain of what day it was, much less what hour.

He was strapped to a surgical table in a white room filled with beeping monitors and machines. He would have gotten a rush of déjà vu except that when he turned his head to find Nicky, there was no one there.

So this was how it was gonna be. More tests in the name of science. Torture in search of something that was impossible to find.

No Nicky.

That was both good and bad, of course. Watching Nicky suffer would always be worse than suffering himself. But Nicky was his strength. His courage. For all their time fighting together it was rare they ever actually got separated. Joe wasn’t sure how he’d hold up without Nicky there. But he had the comfort of knowing that if it was very late then Nicky was already searching for him.

He wondered if he asked nicely would they maybe bring Nicky in and just let him sit in the corner, untouched but within talking distance. That might be nice.

“Mister Jones.”

He sighed. He was going to get tired of hearing that voice speak that name very quickly. “Doctor. My view of Hippocrates must be different than yours.”

Kozak approached him. She was on her own, though a man much like her troops earlier stood back by the door. “Last time it was your friend who wasted his breath trying to moralize with me.”

“Yeah, we switch off.” Joe tested the cuffs at his wrists subtly. “Don’t worry, he’ll be here soon enough. He’s always up for more moralizing.”

She smiled, thin and sharp.

There was something a bit haggard about her, he noticed, like the time between their last meeting and now had been hard. How she had escaped Merrick's lab as the cops swarmed it must have been a story.

“Mister Jones, let me make your situation clear to you. We are no longer in the same country you were in when you were last awake. We were seen by no one. Whatever friends you may have in high places, they will not be able to help you. You are currently far underground, in a location known to maybe a half dozen people in the country. You are mine now. You belong to us. You ought to adjust to the idea quickly.”

Us, he noted. You belong to us. Not 'me'. Apparently she had found a new employer. And she was right, Joe truly had no way of knowing where he was.

But Joe wasn’t the one coming to the rescue here. Nicky was. His faith in Nicky, and Andy and now Nile, would never be shaken by someone like her. 

So he smiled. “I think you’re the one who isn’t clear about her situation.”

She huffed a small breath, as if deciding whether or not to humor him.

He didn’t care, he went on without her encouragement. “You are, what? Maybe forty years old?”

Her eyebrows flew up, looking almost amused by that approach. “Close. I expect you are older than me.”

Joe laughed. “I had already lived centuries before your grandparents met, and I will outlive your great grandchildren. Everything, for me, is the blink of an eye. Including your unhappy life. There is no ‘belonging’ to be done here. You’re nothing, your masters are nothing.” His voice was strong, carrying to the door. He looked over at the single armed guard and smiled at him. “And you. And everyone else who will be part of this. I will outlive all of you, and if I don’t have a chance to track you down before your short, insignificant lives run out, then I will find your children, your grandchildren. Any hurt you deal on me I will pay back. You can believe that. Time is a luxury that I have.”

A bluff, of course. Joe would destroy everyone in that building if he had to, but going after descendants would have been unfair. Still. He saw the nervous eyes of the guard slide from him to the doctor to the door beside him. He watched Kozak’s throat work as she took in his words. And he would bluff all he had to, because fuck them.

Kozak returned his smile after a moment. “If I were to go in and surgically paralyze your vocal cords, how long do you think that would keep your mouth shut?”

He met her eyes easily. “I’m sure you have a list of experiments. Add it on, we’ll find out. Just do it quickly, I don’t plan to be here long.”

Her mouth pressed flat, but she turned and went to the door. The guard escorted her out, sending Joe a nervous look back as he went.

And for all that he was about to go through, he did note that he never saw that particular guard again. 

* * *

There was no car in the field, broken down or otherwise. The road stretched out empty in front and behind it.

Nile’s phone program still insisted that Joe was there, that they were right on top of him.

The night was far too dark around them, the moon having gone behind clouds. The field buzzed with insects, with a breeze that bent its tall dried grasses. Nicky looked around, fists clenching at his sides. Hours now, _hours_ since Joe left him.

“Andy, call his phone.” Nile frowned at her screen, the light reflecting blue on her face. “This thing isn’t precise close up.”

Joe might have been laying in that field feet away, and in this darkness they wouldn’t know unless they tripped on him.

Andy fumbled for her phone. A minute later, Nicky’s attention caught and he peered further out into the field.

Joe had taken a liking to funk music in the 1970s. His phone rang with an unmistakable tune that usually made Nicky smile. That same tune was playing softly out in the darkness.

Nicky charged out into the grass towards the tinny sounds of that tune. He spotted the dimmest light in the grass and stumbled as he went for it, hitting his knees and prying the phone from where it was half stomped into the dirt.

Joe’s phone. Abandoned in a field.

“Nile, take this. Nicky, you found it?”

There was no cold body in the dirt, no blood on the phone. No answers to be found.

A light swept over him, and he blinked over to see Andy and Nile approaching, both waving the giant torches Andy kept in her car. He squinted into the light, lifting a hand to block his eyes.

“What does this mean?” he asked, needing someone else to tell him. He held out the muddy phone.

Andy swept her light over it and her mouth thinned. She looked around, sweeping her light over the tops of the long grasses. “Shit.”

“Andy. Nicky.”

There was something grim in Nile’s voice, making Nicky’s eyes dart to her.

She stood a couple of meters past them, her light shining in front of her, on the ground.

Joe. Nicky shot to his feet and charged through the grass. But there was no body under her light. No anything. He frowned at the empty field, the flattened sections of grass.

Behind him, Andy seemed to see something he didn’t. “Shit. _Shit.”_

“What?”

Nile glanced at him and nodded at where her light shone. “Look at the pattern.”

But he just waited, watching her. He didn’t want to look at patterns, he wanted to look at his Yusuf.

“How the grass is flattened in these two lines?”

Andy finished her thought, her voice grim. “Someone landed here.”

A helicopter. Nicky looked down at the grass and saw the pattern easily.

Someone brought Joe to this spot, took his phone, and put him into a helicopter. Nicky looked from Nile to the grass. Joe’s phone creaked under his fist.

Andy turned her back on the pattern. “Right. We’re gonna find his car, find where they took him from. Nile, call Copley. Whatever surveillance he has access to, we need it. Tell him to look at everything he can from the area for the last few hours.”

“On it.”

Nicky moved with them, almost on reflex. There was something very cold inside his chest, something that was slow to react, to put this all together and realize where it was leading.

There was another part of him, still buried but quickly unearthing itself, that was hot and sharp and sizzling with rage that someone would dare to do this. That this was real, that Joe was missing. Taken, presumably.

It was infuriating. But it was tolerable. Because Nicky would get him back, whether he had to take out a few captors or raze the United Kingdom into dust.

Simple as that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, Joe's ringtone is Funkentelechy. Nicky's is Nessun Dorma. Nobody else has ringtones, because jesus, guys, get with the decade. But they like 'em.


	3. Chapter 3

Their first kiss had not been passionate or driven by adrenaline. It didn’t taste of blood and sweat, as many of their future kisses would. It wasn’t driven by loneliness or grief. There was nothing dramatic about it at all.

They had been traveling together for almost decade by that point. Nicolo, who had wondered at first why this thing should happen to both himself and this heathen warrior, no longer questioned Yusuf's part in it. Yusuf of all men _ought_ to live forever, and perhaps Nicolò simply belonged at his side.

They had only each other. Nicolò trusted only Yusuf, of all the people he had left behind or would come to meet. He had grown from resigned acceptance of that fact to a wild enthusiasm. He only had Yusuf in this world, but _he had Yusuf._

Nicolò was the first to kiss, after spending days alone in a cave at the edges of a desert while Yusuf went for supplies. The cave itself had been a marvel, long dark chambers that opened onto the edges of an underground lake. The water was ice cold and a host to any number of unidentifiable slithering creatures, but Nicolò bathed himself many times, and lay at its edge at night listening to the soft sloshes of animals disturbing the still water. It was calming, and beautiful in a stark way.

Yet when he heard Yusuf’s arrival and went through the low halls of that narrow cavern to meet him, Nicolò realized that he hadn’t felt true peace in days. Peace came in the dark eyes of his constant companion. Not the company itself: Nicolò was quite used to and content with solitude in his life. It was Yusuf.

He greeted Yusuf, helped him move most of his acquired goods into the cave they planned to shelter a few more days in. Then he turned to his friend, captured his hands, and kissed him. It was easy, simple. Yusuf had drawn back after a moment with not a trace of surprise in his expression. Just joy.

For all the wars they fought, before and since that moment, what existed between the two of them was always, always joy.

* * *

Andy was on the phone with Copley, talking low and serious.

Nicky didn’t bother to listen. His focus was on Nile’s computer, the screen, the things Copley had sent through her email. The face in the security footage from the small petrol station.

He stared at that grainy image so intently he almost felt she would blink into motion and look up, return his stare.

“I should have killed her.”

He lay his hand on Nile’s shoulder without looking away from the doctor’s face. He didn’t answer, because of course _he_ should have killed her after what she’d done to them. And at the moment that didn’t matter.

The men with her were military, past or present. It showed in their stances, their haircuts. Behind them, meters away parked beside the road, was a van. In the van was a cracked window, out of which poked the barrel of the rifle that would in a few more seconds put two bullets into Joe.

Joe, only seen from behind, was smiling. Somehow Nicky knew that. He was mocking her, that doctor. He was carrying snack foods, and Nicky made a note to lecture him about that later: immortality was no excuse to fill one’s body with chemical garbage. They had this argument once a year at least. They were overdue.

These people, this doctor, would go on to shoot Joe twice, once in the face. They would put him in their van and drive him to a field and put him into a helicopter. Copley had only found this part captured on video, but he was looking for the rest.

It burned at Nicky, ate at his stomach and burned the heart of him. “Play it again,” he said.

Nile looked over at him. “Nicky…”

He nodded at the screen intently.

She glanced towards Andy, who was busy on the phone and paying no attention. Nile sighed and clicked her mouse.

The footage came to life. The doctor spoke – the video had no sound, but Nicky could read her lips well enough – and seemed very displeased by Joe’s answers. _The Italian,_ he read from her lips as she tried to bluff Joe. Joe’s body shook in laughter at the feeble attempt.

Nicky wanted to smile at that, but he knew what was coming.

A minute later the first shot came, sending Joe reeling backwards a step. He went for his weapon as men approached. Nicky flinched at the second shot despite not being able to hear it. He saw the jerk of it as it toppled Joe, as if for a moment knocked his head back enough that the camera, and Nicky, could see the blown out hole that used to be his eye.

The men caught him before he fell, and the group quickly carried him back to the van.

From what Nicky could tell from this one angle, nobody inside the station was aware of anything happening. The van pulled away, and the footage kept recording dispassionately.

Nile clicked her button, and the picture froze.

“Go back,” Nicky said quietly.

She hissed out a breath through her teeth. “Watching that over and over again isn’t gonna—“

“No. Back. When he first goes in to the shop.”

Nile frowned, but got the video moving backwards. “I really should’ve killed that bitch,” she said under her breath.

Nicky squeezed her shoulder. “Never regret mercy,” he said. “There’s too little of it in the world. Regret when it goes unappreciated by the unworthy.”

She sent him a humorless smile. “It wasn’t mercy. I was just in a hurry.”

“There, stop.” Nicky reached towards the screen as Nile clicked again.

Joe was caught mid-step, almost to the door. He was wearing a neutral expression, but that was typical for any of them out in public, trying not to be noticed. He wasn’t tense, he didn’t realize that anything was wrong. He didn’t see it coming.

Nile clicked a few frames forward, and sighed. On the screen Joe had noticed the security camera and glanced up at it as he approached.

She stopped the image again as Joe looked. It looked as though Joe were gazing out at them.

Nicky swallowed, looking right back at him.

 _I will burn this world down until you’re back with me,_ he promised that image.

Then he straightened and peered out at Andy. “Well?”

She held up a hand, listening in to her phone, but after a moment she lowered it a few inches. “There’s no official record of any helicopters being taken up in the area, but it turns out that doesn’t really mean anything." She frowned and hit a button on her phone. “Go through it again, James, you’re on speaker.”

Copley’s voice was low but clear through the phone. “Most of Cornwall is uncontrolled airspace. Any pilot with a private helicopter can take it out without checking in. Most pilots contact the LTCC before a flight, but there’s no law that says they have to. Hell, they could have made it to Wales, to Scotland, without having to talk to anyone. If they didn’t care about legality they could have been in Ireland or France in a couple of hours. That _should_ require a flight plan, but…”

Andy met Nicky’s eyes over her phone.

Flight plans were easy to get around. They’d done it often enough themselves. They knew well how small and close the world had gotten. And once these men got Joe across a border, getting him anywhere else was so laughably simple.

Nicky drew a breath and let it out. “You’re saying that he could be just about anywhere by now, and we have no way to track it.”

“I have contacts in the LTCC, so I can check a couple of things. But if they were good enough to get their hands on one of you lot then I have to assume they’re good enough to get away again.”

“To anywhere. Anywhere in this world.”

Copley hesitated. “By now? Yeah, I suppose they could be well on their way anywhere.”

Nicky looked away from them, Andy with her grim eyes and Nile with her guilt. He had heard all the conversation he needed to.

He went to the kitchen, and then kept moving to the small mud room that led to the back garden.

The sun was starting to lighten the sky. It was almost morning. Hours had gone by, been wasted. Hours since Joe left, hours since that video on Nile’s computer had been filmed. Hours since that helicopter could have landed in a handful of countries and then set off anywhere else.

They shot him twice. Shot him in the face, and the chest. Maybe the heart itself. Killed Joe twice over, because they knew what he was, and that he would wake up again. Took him for his immortality, wanting it for themselves.

Joe and Nicky had just lived this nightmare. After centuries of worrying about the possibility, they had finally had to live through it. They still had trouble sleeping. Nicky still laid awake long hours, unable to relax enough to sleep, as he felt Joe twitch and flinch from nightmares he would never admit to later.

They hadn’t even recovered yet. How could this have happened again?

Behind him the back door opened and closed softly.

Nicky stood still, looking up at the stars that were vanishing into the lightening horizon. He half expected to feel Joe press in close behind him, feel his arms circle Nicky’s stomach and pull him in. Joe always knew when he was thinking deep thoughts. He always knew when to offer silent comfort, or when to actively try and distract him. Right now he needed comfort.

“Nicky.”

Of course it wasn’t Joe.

He turned and took Andy in. “What do we do?”

She shook her head. “Copley is gonna try a few—“

“We are not going to sit around and wait for someone else to find Joe.”

“Nile will do what she can. Our usual methods…she’s good with tech but she was aboveboard up until a month ago. She doesn’t know to access the kinds of things that…”

That Booker knew.

Nicky nodded instantly. “Call him. Get him here.”

Her eyebrow quirked up the slightest bit. “Are you sure?”

It was Nicky who suggested the longest punishment for Booker. Betrayal of this family was something he couldn’t forgive. That Booker knew their fear of capture, of exposure, and planned exactly that for them in order to get something he wanted…that was beyond reason.

But it also didn’t matter. Not then.

“Call him.”

* * *

The first thing she did, when she reappeared in her lab coat with her hair pulled back and her supplies wheeled in beside her, was slice open his throat with a scalpel.

Joe jerked, unable to move his hands, to grasp his neck and protect himself. He gagged on blood, loud and useless, gasping for breaths that couldn’t come. The blood dripped hot and furious down his chest, down his throat, into his lungs, until he could hear the liquid churn when he tried to breathe in.

He died, and it felt so slow.

He came back, gasping and opening his eyes wildly. He saw her, Kozak, watching him. His eyes left her instantly, jerking around to his other side, needing to find Nicolo.

There was no second bed. No Nicky. Just armed men standing guard off by the doors, looking out past him as if his death and rebirth weren’t worth notice.

“Interesting.”

His eyes snapped back to Kozak. “Where is—“

She thrust her arm out, and the scalpel stabbed deep into his throat.

It was a quicker death this time, the spray of blood arcing high enough to sail right off the cot, but no less horrible.

He came back to himself, finally, with a gurgled breath, coughing from remembered pain. He looked around instantly, but no Nicky. No one else.

“You see,” a voice spoke.

Kozak. Right.

She edged in a few steps. Joe kept his eyes on that scalpel in her hand.

“Every time you open your mouth, that is what will happen. This is what all your threats will get you.”

Joe jerked, yanking at the cuffs on his wrists. He would see that scalpel draw her blood before the end, and it took all his self-control not to tell her as much.

After a moment watching him she seemed content. She set the scalpel down. “I thought to gag you, but this seems more effective, yes? It also gives me research data, so feel free to speak as often as you like.”

Joe glowered, his hands fists. 

If Nicky had been there he would have done something, made some sound to catch Joe’s attention. He would have shaken his head, those old, solemn eyes pleading for Joe to not make things worse.

But Nicky wasn’t there. Only Joe was there, laying coated in his own blood. There was no one there to keep him from tilting his head back, exposing his throat, and meeting her dead in the eye as he spoke.

“Fuck you.”

She sighed and reached for the scalpel.

* * *

Andy and Nicky drove back to Truro to pick up Joe’s car from that petrol station. Nicky spent long minutes standing outside, looking from Joe’s Renault to the store, to the street beyond.

It wasn’t busy, but it was hardly deserted. Right around this time yesterday someone had killed Joe in full view of the store and the road, and it was as if it never happened. It was infuriating.

Andy left him there, driving from the petrol station back to the field to look for more evidence now that it was daylight. Nicky would meet her there, but something kept him standing there in the open, watching the world go by.

He stared out at where he knew the security camera was. After a few minutes he approached the shop, looking up at that camera as he went in, just as Joe had.

It was nothing he hadn’t seen a million times over: maps and car oil and snacks for travelers, generic like so many modern things seemed to be. The cashier barely glanced at him, busy with her phone.

Nicky left the shop after a minute, holding his breath as he stepped outside. The sun was dim overhead, the parking area mostly empty as he returned to the Renault.

He leaned against the car, arms folded over his chest, watching for a long time every person who went in and out. Every car that passed he watched. Every car that stopped he stared at, wondering, until it spat out its innocent passengers and he was left to watch tiny moments of normal people’s lives play in front of him.

He lost track of time, watching this small piece of an innocent world going on around him.

Joe spoke often of Nicky’s big heart, but if he let himself Nicky could easily despise these people. How could they not have noticed?

They had been to Cornwall before, of course. Joe and Nicky had probably crossed these hills and valleys on horseback before anything was there but the cathedrals. More recently they had traveled from France to County Cork a century ago, via Cornwall and Wales, curious to watch the sailing of the HMS Titanic.

They were in Galway when the world learned of the ship’s fate. “With our luck I’m surprised we weren’t on it,” Joe had said. “We ought to check in with Andy and Booker to make sure they were nowhere near it.”

Nicky chastised him at the time for joking about such a tragedy, but his protests were halfhearted. They had lived through too many tragedies to regard them as sacred. They had all swung from gallows in their time, surely gallows humor was to be expected. This time they were in no position to help, so they had to just accept it.

And frankly Nicky really had been surprised that Booker wasn’t on the ship. Their youngest sometimes-companion seemed to gravitate towards misery.

Nicky’s phone beeped in his pocket, dragging him from his memories.

A text from Andy: _If they haven’t come for you by now they’re not going to. Get over here._

Nicky frowned at the words until they made sense to him.

And, well. Of course that’s what he was waiting on. He didn’t fear capture or torture. If that’s what had to happen to get him to where Joe was, he would walk into it with a smile on his face. It was far better than waiting around for other men and their technology to get some kind of lead.

She was right, though. They had come for Joe quickly. They weren’t coming back.

He got into the car.

Andy was out in the field when he reached it, skulking around as he parked the car behind hers. When he got out and shut the door, she looked over fast and seemed to melt a little with relief when she saw him.

He moved through the grass, looking around as he went. This was the place and right about the time Joe had been taken the day before. Again, there were occasional cars driving along the road, yet seemingly no one had paid any attention to a helicopter in a random field.

“Anything?” he called as he approached.

She blew out a breath. “Anything that can help? No.”

“But there’s something?”

Andy looked around them at the sprawl of the tall grasses, the hilly green beyond that seemed to stretch forever, broken by occasional roads in the distance, a house, a farm. Sheep, ignoring everything but the demands of their bellies.

Nicky frowned as he reached her. “Andy?”

“His knives, his gun. All left on the other side of the helicopter tracks. They’re locked up in the trunk. And…damn it.” She blew short strands of dark hair from her face and held out a hand. “Here.”

Nicky peered at her hand as her fist unclenched. He swallowed. He looked away for a moment, rubbing his temple. “Andy…”

“We’re getting him back.” Andy spoke with that rock hard conviction that led them through endless wars. She always spoke like she could will the words to be true if she was firm enough about them. And usually she was right.

He reached out and took the two heavy silver rings from her hand. Unmistakable to him despite the mud, and despite the fact that they weren’t attached to the fingers they were meant to be on. He looked down at them, remembering their whole history.

Joe had one of them specially made. He found a jeweler in Persia sometime in the 1500s who specialized in this granulation process that reminded him of his home, his past. Together he and the jeweler developed a subtle design that had meant something to Joe that he said he couldn’t put into words for Nicky. Something cultural, something from his first life.

He had wanted to make Nicky something, too, in the same style. But Nicky wasn’t fond of jewelry of any kind, and he’d resisted. Better to get him a new sword, he’d said. Or a stronger saddle.

Whatever Joe ended up gifting him with was long gone. 

The second ring Joe had seen in a market in the 1900s and simply liked. Nicky had gone back and bought it for him later, sliding it on his finger as he slept that night. It took Joe an hour the next day to realize it was there, which Nicky teased him over for years after.

Joe liked jewelry. He liked to collect beautiful things, and had pieces stashed in most of their safe houses. But these two stayed with him. These two were constant.

“Nicky.”

He looked up at Andy.

Her phone was in her hand. “Booker’s coming. We should go.”

As they moved back out of that field to their cars, Nicky slid the two rings onto his fingers silently.

* * *

Despite her threats it only took Kozak a few hours to give in and actually order her men to gag him.

“I think death must be a comfort to you, to want it so much,” she said after they left him there, thick fabric covering from under his nose down below his chin.

He could barely breathe, which after dying from having his throat cut a dozen times was enough to drive him close to panic.

Worth it, though. Fuck her.

“It’s fascinating, the sheer physics of it.” She approached him, those cool eyes taking in the red that covered his body by then, heavy as a blanket. “This is _liters_ of your blood. Enough to fill your veins twice over. The power that heals you replaces it, creates more. Creates matter itself. It goes against everything we believe about fundamental natural law.”

Joe shut his eyes and focused on breathing, trying to ignore her as she went back to her table to rummage through her medical supplies.

“Tell me, Mister Jones. How far does this rejection of physics go? When something is cut off of you does it have to reattach itself, or can it regrow from nothing?”

God damn it. He squeezed his eyes tighter closed, fisting his hands in the cuffs.

“You understand that this is something I have to find out, yes? It’s nothing personal.”

Joe had lived through dismemberment before, just as it wasn’t the first time someone had slit his throat to kill him. He felt the light prick of a saw blade at his wrist, and he refused to look, refused to see fascination in her eyes as she started slicing a part of him away.

Her mistake was taking his entire hand.

He screamed into the gag, went dizzy from pain and blood loss, but he held on. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought of Andy in her defiant mortality, and Nile in her incredible strength for as new as she was. He thought of Nicky, of course, the times Nicky had been there to witness his tortures. The way he watched Joe's suffering, grieved but always sure Joe was strong enough to get through it.

And he didn’t pass out.

When she was done, when he felt the sickly feeling of the last threads of skin being cut, the quickly cooling hand being pulled free from his body, only then did his eyes open.

He moved fast. He jerked the stump of his wrist free from its cuff, and he lunged, bashing that smug, cold woman across the face with the back of his arm. She fell backwards, crying out, his blood smearing over her face as she stumbled.

A gunshot rang out, and Joe barely felt it through the agony searing up his arm. He sank back into the cot, content, waiting to bleed out.

She was right, after all. Death often was a comfort.


	4. Chapter 4

Five years into Booker’s immortality, Nicky came to Joe one night deeply upset.

He didn’t show it, of course. Nicky’s emotional responses to things were subtle, especially compared to Joe’s. It was one of the things Joe loved most about him, that he was such a deep well. Unfortunately, that was also the reason for his current upset.

“Sebastian,” he said after Joe sat beside him on their bed and asked what was wrong.

Their newest companion was a source of discomfort more times than not. He relied on alcohol, he lived too much in his old life instead of trying to appreciate this new one. He would adjust in time – what choice did he have, after all – but the growing pains were difficult for them all.

Andy spent a lot of time alone in those days.

“What did he say?” It would have been words. Wine made Sebastian snappish.

“He asked about us. You and me.”

Joe was amused by that. “He’s surely seen enough to understand us by now.”

Nicky drew a breath and let it out, and there was genuine distress pulling at his features. He didn’t look Joe in the eye, though he reached for Joe’s hand and held it.

Joe frowned at all those signs. “Tell me.”

“He wasn’t being cruel, that’s the worst thing. He was…concerned. For me.” Nicky’s throat worked. His gaze was on the floor. “He thinks that I don’t love you as you love me. That you are entranced with me, and I…I just go along. That our situation makes refusing you too awkward after all this time. Or that I would be too lonely if I let you go.”

Joe would have laughed at that idea if Nicky didn’t seem so genuinely hurt by it. He would have bet money that Sebastian had been building up to suggesting himself as an alternative to Joe or loneliness.

“He just doesn’t know you yet, Nicolò.”

“It’s not the first time someone has gotten that idea about us.”

It wasn’t. Once or twice in their past, dashing suitors had come to rescue Nicolò from his obsessive lover. Joe had been appalled by it, enraged, at least back then. He worried that he was too intense, too aggressive with his devotion. In the end, though, he couldn’t bring himself to change. Nicolò loved him, why would anyone else’s opinion matter?

Why should Sebastian's?

He stayed silent, though, knowing Nicky. Nicky struggled to speak when it mattered most to him, and anything besides silence might shut him down.

“I am cold,” Nicky said finally, the words stark.

Joe laughed.

Nicky looked at him then, for an instant hurt before he took Joe’s expression in and relaxed. “I can seem cold,” he amended. “When it's about myself, my own feelings, I can seem cold. To anyone who isn’t you.”

“Not cold. Quiet, watchful. Careful.” Joe lifted their joined hands and brushed his lips across Nicky’s knuckles. “Never cold.”

“If I ever give you reason to doubt my love for you…”

“In seven centuries you never have, not for a moment. No reason to think that you ever will.”

Nicky smiled at that, faint.

Most of his smiles were faint. Most of his laughs were soft chuckles, or puffs of air. Nicky was as expressive as the next man (even now, when the next man was Joe), one just had to understand that the slight upturn of his lips was equivalent to a beaming grin on other men. That the soft huff of a laugh was every bit as real and deep as Joe’s window-rattling roars of amusement.

There was so much passion in Nicky’s veins that Joe thought he could drown in it.

Joe spoke, though he already knew Nicky’s reaction. “And if I am ever too much for you to handle…”

Horror was a glint in Nick’s eye, the tightening of his grip on Joe’s hand, the slightly parted mouth that let out a hiss of a breath as if he’d just been hit.

So, so expressive, this man. He was a language to be learned, though, and Joe was fluent.

“It would break my heart if you ever thought you had to change yourself for me,” Nicky said, as Joe predicted he would. “You are perfect.”

“For you, maybe,” Joe answered. “And you for me. Sebastian will just have to find another bed-mate.”

“Joe! He didn’t mean it in that way. You think everyone wants me.” But the bleakness was out of Nicky’s eyes, the worry gone from the sides of his mouth.

And so Joe was content.

* * *

Joe had been left alone some time ago. Nighttime, he assumed, but there were no windows to confirm it. The doctor hadn’t bothered to tell him anything: she just wrapped up her work, turned the lights off, and filed out with her soldiers, leaving nothing but whirring machines and a refrigeration unit full of Joe’s body parts.

They had removed his gag, at least.

“They do grow back from nothing!” Kozak had updated him, thrilled, when Joe woke up from becoming a temporary amputee. She had put his old hand in a jar of liquid and into storage, and immediately got to work taking his arm instead, complete with freshly regrown hand. One of her men had to help her in the end. Sawing through a shoulder was tougher than a wrist.

He had passed out that time. Died, he thought. Bled out. 

He could have told her, of course, that their limbs grew back. That they had been blown up and hacked at and even, a time or two, had their hearts carved out, and that the pieces were never just reattached.

He could also have told her that by the morning her fridge would be empty, that the solid parts of them that were cut away tended to crumble into dust until even the dust was gone. He didn’t know why, or how, but though their powers did test the bounds of physics, physics always ended up winning. Nothing truly created or destroyed, just replaced.

He couldn’t wait to see her anger and disappointment in the morning, when she found her jars empty. It was the one thing he had to look forward to, until his escape or rescue.

Joe had woken from that first amputation with more straps on him: at his wrists, still, and then his elbows, and tight across his shoulders, and around his chest. His legs in three places, and a thick nylon band at his neck, keeping him flat. Keeping him entirely immobile.

He felt numb all over, those long hours he was on his own. He had been stripped of his shirt, cleaned of old blood, and left to rot there on that table. He hadn’t eaten, hadn’t been given water. No doubt another data point for her research, but after healing so much he felt empty inside. Hollow.

He wanted Nicky there. They would have kept themselves going through the night with long looks and soft words, shared memories traded through the darkness. Even just the sound of Nicky breathing would have soothed.

But then, of course, that was also the last thing in the world he wanted.

Joe was aware of the beeping of equipment, the constant red lights from security cameras at every angle He was being recorded if not actively watched, he knew. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from speaking aloud, if only for the company of his own voice.

“Oh, Nicky.” He sighed, sliding into that mix of ancient Arabic and French and Genoese that was their own language. “I'm glad you are spared this, but you would know what to say to keep me strong.”

 _Sleep_ , he thought. That’s what Nicky would say. _Sleep, Joe, and gain strength for the next challenge._

* * *

Booker looked no different, and Nicky didn’t know why that surprised him. Aside from their general immortality, it had been only about a month since they saw each other last. They routinely went far longer than that without contact.

The other surprise was that he didn’t come alone.

Copley got out of the car after Booker, stretching and peering around as Nicky opened the front door to watch.

Andy slid past him and out to the car, meeting Copley. “You came.”

Copley shrugged. “It’s Merrick’s doctor, that means the blame for this lays on my shoulders. I owe you at least my presence. I brought equipment, I can do just as much from here as I could in London.”

Nicky watched as Booker moved around the car to them, looking at Andy with wide, nervous eyes. A starving man, Nicky thought, who had just laid eyes on a feast and wasn’t sure he was allowed to eat.

Copley was right, of course. It was Kozak responsible for Joe being taken, and that meant this was still fallout from Merrick. It meant that as much as Copley was responsible for setting this into motion, Booker was just as liable.

Nicky couldn’t think about that, though. This rage growing inside of him, it had to have one target only. Unleashing it on others would be unfair, and a waste. Anger was a weapon in itself, after all.

He stepped back from the doorway, moving through the house to the kitchen as Nile approached the door to have her own less fraught reunion with these two men.

Nicky? He would feed them. It was what he did.

It’s what he’d done since his second or third decade of immortality, when he and Joe decided to settle for a while and try to recreate a real life for themselves. They chose Sardinia that time. Symbolic, looking back, that they chose somewhere that wasn’t the Maghreb, and wasn’t Genoa, but was halfway between the two lands.

Nicky was good at it. Cooking. Good at teaching himself how to replicate meals they’d had through their travels. He became an expert on spices (“a talented tongue in more ways than one,” Joe laughed often), and he never lost that fascination with learning how cultures flavored their foods.

The times Joe missed his home and mourned his family, Nicky would recreate a dish that would bring tears to his eyes. When he was feeling sentimental himself, he would bake himself a cassata and feel like a spoiled child again for a day.

It was instinct by now, to want to feed. So despite his conflicting feelings and his missing love, Nicky would make lunch.

That was as kind as he could be.

* * *

He’d never been skinned before.

How fascinating, to have a brand new experience.

It was a strange kind of pain, slow as she did it. He thought he could feel every single nerve as it was severed, as the two inch wide strip of skin was lifted centimeter by centimeter from his thigh. The sensation left afterwards was hot, like scar tissue from a fresh burn.

She was methodical. Precise. So focused on her work that she hardly seemed to breathe. She was so slow that by the time she made the final cut and lifted the skin away, the other end of the wound was halfway to replacing itself.

Joe hummed into his gag.

She glanced his way but went back to work, getting his strip of skin onto a wide plastic slide.

Joe made another sound, sharp.

Kozak peered at him, but put a lid on her slide and stood. She reached first for the bloody scalpel she always used to kill him, but finally she tugged the gag down.

Joe gulped in a breath, deep enough to make him cough.

“You have something to say?”

Joe slumped back. He could feel the strip on his leg as it finished knitting itself back together. “I’m curious,” he said. His voice was ragged from screaming into his gag.

“About what, Mister Jones?”

“This.” He nodded towards the slide, the blood smeared strip of skin. “You have to know by now that there’s nothing to find.”

“You seem sure of that. What do you know of recent scientific advancements? My old employer was something of a peacock, but his company has made real progress in—“

“I saw Merrick’s TED Talk, spare me a repeat.”

She seemed amused by that. “He might have been ridiculous, but he wasn’t stupid.”

“It doesn’t matter. The science doesn’t matter. There’s nothing in my cells or skin or DNA that’s any different than yours.”

“That’s impossible.”

“It’s true, so it must be possible.”

“You don’t know that. We can see things now that were impossible even five years ago.” She turned away from him, taking her slide. She left his gag at his neck, though, which was something.

Maybe Nicky was right when he said Joe’s belligerence got him into more trouble that it was worth.

“I’ll tell you what I do know,” he said, keeping his voice level. “I know that you tear pieces of me away without bothering to study the ones you already have. I know that you want me to suffer so you do it while I’m awake. I know you want me to think that all you care about is helping humanity, but everything you do shows that this is vindictiveness. This is torture. And you enjoy doing it.”

She had pulled out some kind of gelatinous solution and was pouring it carefully over his skin in its slide, but she seemed to be listening. “I try not to trouble myself with moral issues when it comes to my work.”

“Give me a break. You could have sedated me from the start and saved us both a lot of hassle. You can’t tell me there’s some medical reason why I’m awake and aware.”

She slid the lid back on the slide and took it to one of the soldiers. She murmured instructions and he walked out the door.

She turned back to Joe. “I bet you ask yourself all the time, why you? Of all the people who might have been given this gift, why were you chosen?”

He shrugged the inch his straps allowed him to move. “I save my philosophizing for when I’m drunk. Like you and your morals, I’d imagine.”

Kozak smiled thinly. “Well, I wonder it. I don’t know everything about your history, but I know there are so very few of you in the whole spread of human history that you must be significant.”

Joe huffed out a soft breath. She sounded like Nicky. He was the first to tell them all that there were reasons for this life and the suffering they went through. He would tell Joe once they were back together that even this happened to him for a reason.

Joe couldn’t imagine she meant it as the reassurance that Nicky did, though.

“I wonder why you’ve chosen to do what you do with this gift of yours. You might live to see the end times, and you don’t use the time to learn, to heal the world. You spend it at war.”

Joe snorted. “Mostly the war comes to us.”

“Imagine if you had studied medicine, how you might have changed the course of the world.”

Some of them had, at different times. There wasn’t much they hadn’t spent time learning. But Joe was speaking to her because he was hurting, and alone. Not because she had the right to learn anything about him and his family.

“My father was a doctor.” She sat in the chair down by his healed incision, smoothing a gloved fingertip along the repaired skin. “My grandfather. My daughter is in medical school.”

“You’re a mother?” Joe couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.

She cast him a wry look before turning her back to him, to her table of tools.

Joe shut his eyes for a moment, bracing himself. Pain was insidious, and something he never got used to. This sustained pain for no reason…this was hard.

“My brother died in Iraq, for a war which had nothing to do with us,” Kozak said suddenly. “My grandfather died during the second World War. His medical tent was bombed, a war crime.” 

Joe couldn’t stop himself. “Which side was he fighting for?”

She turned in her chair, holding a small device of some kind, something pencil-shaped that was plugged in to the wall behind her. There was real anger in her eyes. “He wasn't fighting for anyone. He was a _doctor_. He didn't deserve to die.”

And Joe didn't deserve to live forever. That implication was clear enough. Maybe that was part of what drove her, this idea that his power was a gift that had been wrongfully bestowed.

Joe looked away from her and that tool in her hand. “I remember World War Two. A hell of a lot of doctors were committing atrocities regularly, worse than anything a soldier could do.”

“The Nazis, yes. The Japanese. Not my grandfather.”

“Considering where I am and what you’re doing to me, you’ll excuse me for being dubious.”

Kozak lifted her tool. “This is an electrocauter. Do you know what it does?”

Joe looked away from her, mouth shut tight.

“It’s a surgical tool. It removes unwanted tissue and cauterizes as it goes, to prevent bleeding. Do you think your body will heal as quickly if your wounds are cauterized?”

God damn it. _Any time now, Nicky. Andy. Come on._

“The interesting thing about those doctors during the second world war,” she went on, leaning in and studying his skin as if to pick what choice bit she’d hack off, “is that they were rewarded for their deeds. Rewarded by the side you seem to think was more noble. Many of the cruelest of the Japanese doctors were brought to the United States and given pardons and new lives. The knowledge they gained through their atrocities was information everyone wanted. The Japanese were simply the ones willing to get their hands dirty. What does that tell you?”

Joe knew that keeping quiet was the only right move here. But in the end there wasn’t a right move, because he would bleed either way.

He dropped his head back on the cot, speaking through his teeth. “It tells me that there are people like you in the world, who hear about Unit 731 and want to emulate the doctors. I wouldn’t have thought that kind of soullessness really existed.”

She sighed. “I don’t suppose I could expect you to understand.”

And then she went to work on his knee.

* * *

“So this is where I’ve started.” Copley had set up his laptop and a small projector in the living room of the safehouse, and had a list of names displayed on the wall. “Kozak had been working for Merrick for years, and before that she worked for a company Merrick absorbed. I’m searching out who she might have gone to the last few weeks, but I have to assume it’s one of Merrick’s competitors.”

“And this is them?” Nicky stared at those names. There were far too many.

“A lot of them. These are pharma CEOs who would have the pull and the lack of morals to follow in Merrick’s footsteps, at least in my opinion.”

“The men with her were soldiers,” Andy pointed out. “What if this is a government job?”

Copley frowned. “I’ve got ears back at the agency listening to official chatter from around the globe. If there's some kind of secret foreign action happening here, it may be tough to pin down."

“What if it's the British government?”

Copley blinked at Andy. “Do you seriously think the British government—“

“I think we’ve had enough run-ins with MI-5 and the SIS to know that English civility is a damn lie.” Andy aimed her half-drunk beer at Copley. “And you were CIA, so let’s not feign surprise here. Colonial superpower, right?”

Copley looked at his list on the wall, but sighed. “Fine, we’re not excluding any options at this point. But checking out just the pharma angle is a huge job, we’re not in any shape to spy on every government on the planet.”

Nicky kept studying that list, seeing not one name he was familiar with. “If we have to take on every government on the planet then that’s what we’ll do.”

There was a moment of silence.

Nile broke it. “I don’t think they were current military. I know regs are different by countries, but a couple of them had outgrown haircuts. And a couple were pretty paunchy.”

“Mercenaries, then.” Andy sighed. “So that means we can also include any megalomaniac with money to burn and a possible interest in immortality.”

“Fine, track down any man like that and add them to the list.” Nicky turned his eyes to Copley expectantly.

He laughed without humor. “Well, it’s not that easy, is it?”

“Why not?”

“Nicky, we’re talking potentially tens of thousands of people spread all over the world.”

“Yes?” Nicky looked back at the others. “We will talk to every one of them if we have to.”

Booker looked back at him with that hangdog sorrow he’d had all day. Andy looked grim, and Nile wide-eyed and overwhelmed.

Nicky frowned at them. “It has been more than forty-eight hours, and this talking is getting us nothing but more names for this list. Kozak has Joe. There is nothing else for us to do but find these people.”

“Between Booker, Nile and myself, we can at least weed out any of the names that haven’t been spotted in the UK,” Copley said thoughtfully.

“But there’s no proof he’s still in the UK, so that does us no good.”

"Christ," Booker muttered. "This is ridiculus."

“Kozak,” Nile said suddenly. “Forget who's financing her, focus on her. If Copley has access to CCTV feeds and Booker knows all these secret ways to track people, we have to follow her. Where has she been the last few weeks, and who has she talked to?”

Andy flashed a small, real smile. “Good, Nile. Get on that. Booker, keep Nile with you, teach her whatever the hell it is you do. Copley, I’m guessing there will be a lot of footage to go through to track her movements, so me and Nicky are with you.”

Copley let out a breath. “You have no idea. I’ve got facial recognition software running on current feeds, but finding her movements over the last month...we’re taking on an impossible task here.”

“No,” Nicky looked at him. “An impossible task would be if we were reduced to murdering every single person we see hoping to create a new immortal who might then dream of Joe and give us clues. But I will do that if it's the only option left, so we will do this now.”

“Jesus, Nicky.”

His eyes snapped over to Booker, and the simmering anger that had been keeping him company these past two days felt dangerously close to boiling over.

He pushed out of his chair, knowing he was close to saying something that would only slow the search for Joe. “Mi scusi, per favore.”

“Nicky…”

He ignored Andy’s groan and walked out through the front door, striding away from that oppressively small house and the stares of the people he knew best in the world.

 _Most_ of the people he knew best.

It was…intolerable. Infuriating. He was braced and ready to fight. He was prepared to cut through a thousand soldiers if he had to, to die and come back a thousand times. He wanted to move, to react, to fight. He was ready to kill Kozak with the same dispassion she’d tortured them with.

He was a bullet primed and ready in its chamber.

But he had no target.

Joe was just _gone_ , and there seemed to be frighteningly little Nicky could do about that.

Footsteps from behind caught his focus, but he kept his eyes ahead, on the overcast dullness of the sun as it touched the horizon. Had he been here only hours ago, watching the sun rise with Andy the one trying to get through to him?

“Have you slept at all?”

Booker. How brave of him.

Nicky shrugged, looking out at the sunset to keep from seeing pity in Booker’s eyes. That would be too much.

“Nicky…”

“If you apologize to me again I will stab you in the heart,” he said calmly.

“Right.”

Nicky wasn’t surprised to hear a soft sloshing beside him. That flask. It was a part of Booker by now. Joe often teased him about how small it was, how often he had to refill it. How he ought to simply attach a handle to whatever bottle he was drinking from and lug the whole thing with him.

There was no sympathy for Booker’s drinking. They had all been through it. Andy had lost decades at a time more than once to drink. Joe and Nicky usually kept each other from falling into bottles for too long, but still it was a phase they went through. It would pass, and return again.

It was some kind of cognac, from the smell. Less potent than what he’d been drinking a month ago. Maybe he was on his way out.

“You know what the longest period of time is?”

Nicky pressed his lips together tightly. “I came out here for silence.”

“It’s a day.” Booker screwed the cap back on his flask and slid it back into his pocket. “One single day. You’d think months and years would be longer, but they’re not. Because all they are are days repeated.”

“Booker.”

“I’m serious. Tell me I have a thousand years left to live, or ten thousand, and I can bear the weight of that. One hundred years alone…I can live with it. But there are times when I wake up in the morning and realize I have one more entire _day_ ahead of me, and it’s too much.”

Nicky let out a breath.

Maybe there was truth there. When this was all over, Nicky would be able to measure it. It would be ‘that time Joe was taken and we didn’t find him for two weeks,’ or something of the sort. It would seem laughably short, compared to the span of their lives.

But for Nicky to go to bed alone and wake alone in the morning, to know on waking that this was likely going to be one more entire day without Joe…it was a living nightmare. It was too heavy to be carried.

He looked away from the sky, away from Booker, to the small garden in front of them.

Nothing grew there but weeds, since no one stayed long enough to nurture anything. Maybe after this they would settle again, he and Joe. Spend a few years comfortably in one place. Not here, not anywhere near England. Somewhere warmer. Back to the Mediterranean, likely. He enjoyed his time with his team, and getting to know Nile was thrilling. But he and Joe deserved some time to themselves.

He thought he might like to grow a real garden. It had been decades since he last tried.

“Nicky.”

“You hate us, don’t you? Joe and I.”

In the stark silence that followed that, Nicky turned to Booker finally. No pity there now, at least. Just shock.

“How could you ask me that?”

Nicky didn’t feel a return of that rage, not yet. Just curiosity. “You sold us to Merrick.”

“I didn’t know how that was going to go down.”

“You knew enough.”

It was Booker’s turn to look away. “You want the truth, Nicky?”

Nicky followed his gaze out to the truly underwhelming sunset. Could Joe see it wherever he was? Was the sun even setting for him yet? Not knowing was the worst kind of torture.

“The truth is I wasn’t thinking about the two of you at all. Joe called me selfish. He was right.”

A selfish piece of shit. Nicky remembered. He had hushed Joe at the time.

“I wanted an ending. I used Andy to justify it, because she wanted one too. That you two might want to go on together…I didn’t think about it. I didn’t care.”

Nicky nodded slowly. “That’s worse than hatred.”

“I know.” Booker’s voice went hoarse. “All I think about these days is the two of you. Bonding with Joe over sports, teaching you to cook my mother’s duxelles and white fish. The way Joe would get in so much trouble getting into brawls at my side in the years when I was…” He swallowed audibly. “All the things I pushed aside in my...my determination to be lonely. I have to stay drunk to keep them out of my head.”

“Do you want sympathy?” Nicky asked, genuinely curious.

“Someday, maybe.” Booker smiled in his small, bitter way. “It’s just the truth, it doesn’t need a response.” He turned suddenly and headed back for the house. “Sleep tonight, Nicky. You’ll be no good to Joe if you’re exhausted. There’s a whole new day starting tomorrow, you should prepare for that.”

But Nicky couldn’t seem to move. Not until after the sun was gone.


	5. Chapter 5

In the entire span of their lives together, Joe and Nicky had fucked other people exactly once.

It had been during a rather hedonistic span of years in the 1960s. They didn’t often fall into drug and alcohol spirals together, they tended to stagger. But something in the era had affected them both. They found themselves deep in the back rooms of a club in West Germany, smoking harsh but potent marijuana and taking LSD tablets for the brief high it gave them before their bodies rejected the chemicals.

Nicky couldn’t have explained how it happened, only that the music was pulsing with the beginnings of disco, the air was heavy with smoke, and the back room was thick with sex. Shameless couples and more shameless spectators, moans and cries and the sounds of bodies moving together.

Nicky had been approached first by a ridiculously pretty man who knelt between his legs before Nicky could find a voice to object. He looked to Joe, but Joe was watching with blown out eyes and growing interest. A woman, tall and thick with curves, distracted him quickly.

They ended up bending their partners over each side of the worn couch they’d been sitting on, and looking only at each other as they fucked. Nicky meant to watch the woman, to see how Joe’s cock would affect someone else, to be proud as he took her apart. But by the next day he had no memory of her face, though he clearly remembered the light and smoke flickering off Joe’s body, the flex of his thighs, the flush on his face as they watched each other.

“Do you regret it?” Joe asked him the next day, when they woke stuck together in the safety of their own small apartment.

“No,” Nicky said honestly. “But no more.”

“No,” Joe agreed with a satisfied smile. “We’re too old, mein bärchen, and the world feels too young.”

* * *

His life became a blur.

He would wake up in the morning shocked that he managed to fall asleep. He would wander from Copley’s research to Nile and Booker’s, wanting to sob out his frustration and shake their computers until Joe fell out. He would have a thought and turn to Joe to voice it a dozen times over, or come into the house and look around for him first thing, as he always did. And, worst, he would climb into an empty bed at night and shake for wanting Joe there.

They would come up with a thin lead and follow it and it would vanish.

Hours somehow became days.

Days horribly, slowly became weeks.

Copley had to return to London for his career, but he stayed constantly on Booker’s phone and swore he was working as hard as ever. Andy and Nile took an hour a day to continue Nile’s combat training, and it was all Nicky could do to not resent them for it.

Sometimes they would laugh at something, one of them, and Nicky would feel his entire body go cold. He would want to hit them. Sometimes he found himself at the oven making dinner for them all and got overwhelmed with self-loathing.

It was life, that was all. Life going on, as it inevitably did. They had to eat, they had to take time off. They had to live.

But Nicky couldn’t. Nicky was half a soul. He was haggard from constant lack of sleep, mind numbed by wanting so badly, so constantly.

He lost control once. Late into the night, as he rolled over searching out Joe’s warmth for the tenth time and woke himself up from not finding it. He muffled his weeping but Nile heard. She came to him, stayed with him. Not taking Joe’s place, but sitting up beside him, stroking his hair silently. Nicky sobbed into her thigh so hard that he woke the next morning feeling hungover from dehydration.

A month went by. They followed possible leads to Turkey, and then to Toronto, and then to South Africa.

Nicky caught himself once or twice taking in a landscape, watching the stars or a passing crowd or a flock of birds, and he’d for a moment think about beauty and life. And then he would remember, _Joe_. It made him feel sick. It felt like betrayal.

The others, he tried not to hate them for living their lives. They were all used to spending time apart, after all, and Nile had known Joe only for a month. Joe’s being missing weighed on them all, weighed on Andy heavily, but they could still breathe.

After almost a thousand years together, Nicky couldn’t. He couldn’t breathe, and he couldn’t remember why he might want to.

This was what Joe’s death would feel like, he realized after that first month. This half-life. They had often talked before about what would happen if one of them went first. They hadn’t gotten it right at all. The despair, yes, and the anger. But the way everything dulled, the way the world shrank and darkened and grew evil, that hadn’t been in their predictions.

Nicky wouldn’t survive it.

Copley called, five weeks after Joe kissed Nicky goodbye and left on his errands. “It’s a quick job, it’s in Wales. You could be done tomorrow.”

Andy told him to go fuck himself. Copley didn’t press.

Next time she would be less vehement. Eventually she would say yes. Eventually the horrors of the world would get to be too much, and they would go back to work.

Nile came to Nicky that night, after Copley’s call, as Nicky sat at the deserted table and tried to imagine going on.

Her fingers toyed with the small cross at her neck. “Andy says you were a priest.”

Nicky just waited.

She swallowed, awkward. She sat beside him, and spoke quietly. “Can I pray for you?”

Nicky wasn’t sure he had any faith left. But he nodded. He bowed his head when she did, and shut his eyes as she murmured.

Movement at his other side after a few minutes, and then Booker’s soft voice spoke along with hers, low and French and reverent in a way he’d never been, the whole time Nicky knew him.

Hands on his shoulders from behind. Andy didn’t pray, didn’t believe, but she stood with them.

Nicky knew then that he was wrong, and cruel, to think that the others in their family could easily get back to their lives without Joe. He bent his head lower, and in rusty, cobwebbed Latin he spoke his own prayers.

* * *

His life became a blur.

Kozak ruled his days and nights. Sometimes she was gone for what felt like days at a time, sometimes she was at his side, working through her growing frustration for such long hours that she sometimes fell asleep on her samples.

He forgot what it felt like not to hurt.

He wasn’t fed, but his stomach had stopped growling long ago. His straps had to be tightened daily as he grew thinner.

He wasn’t given water, but when that began to kill him without Kozak’s permission she hooked him up to an IV. She seemed pleased to realize that his body treated the IV as another wound, constantly trying to push it out and heal. She taped it down so tightly that it stayed inside of him, but he felt the burn of nerves trying to re-knit.

Soon enough he forgot what it was like not to have that new undercurrent of pain eating at his brain constantly.

She got frustrated in waves, leaving him on his own as if she was giving up, only to come back furious and with a list of further tests that might change her results.

She stopped speaking to him, no matter how much noise he made under his gag.

Joe got feverish, and then healed himself. He starved, and healed himself. He was under her knife for hours at a time, and his body healed. He felt bedsores forming, muscles atrophying, but they healed. The only change that stuck was the sharp angles he started to see down his arms, the way his skin seemed to stretch over bone with nothing between them. But even that wouldn’t kill him.

“It’s got to run out sometime,” she said one day, sounding tired and annoyed but at least not enraged. “There’s no calories in you, and healing must take energy.”

She didn’t want to hear him respond, didn't care what the lab mouse thought, but silently Joe agreed. He thought, for a while, that it might be his release. That his body would run out of energy, that his exhausted cells would forget how to knit back together and he might disintegrate away into dust. He wanted it, and hated himself for that.

But then he remembered Quynh. Five hundred years, thirty or forty deaths an hour, no food, no air. Still going, if Nile’s dreams were current. No release after all.

As Kozak grew frustrated, she took it out on Joe. She liked to taunt him, to tell him stories.

“That team of yours was spotted in France,” she’d come in reporting, cruel cheerfulness in her voice. “Fighting terrorists. They aren’t even looking for you.”

He didn’t believe it for a moment. Not the first time she brought in a story. Or the second. Or the third.

But God, it had been so long. Weeks, years, he didn’t know anymore. Maybe they really were staying busy out there. Doing good. Could he hate them for that?

Maybe.

His only relief was in the hours he was alone, when he could have imaginary conversations with Nicky, he could go over his day, imagine what Nicky’s might have been. He could tell Andy about what Kozak had done, and take comfort in her imagined fury. He could teach Nile, use his pain for her lessons, to make her stronger and harder, the way she would have to be someday.

Even Booker. Joe would yell at him through his gag, or silently when his voice gave out entirely. He would apologize, over and over again, for whatever it was he had done to Booker that had put him on that table.

But he always went back to Nicky, even when his brain was too tired to imagine conversations and he could only beg Nicky to come, to find him. He begged for Nicky to forgive him for his capture, and for not being strong enough to get away on his own.

No matter how feverish he got, or how much he despaired, in his mind Nicky always forgave him.

* * *

“Eat.”

Nicky frowned at the plate that slid in front of him. He looked up at Andy. “I ate yesterday.”

“Yeah, well. It works better when you do it over and over again.” She pulled out the chair across from him and sat heavily. “Come on, Nicky. You’re the one who takes care of us. I don’t know how to do this.”

He saw the genuine pain in her eyes, which said a lot. Andy was always conscious of being their elder and leader. She didn’t like to show weakness, especially now that she was mortal. So for her to be showing her fear meant that that fear was bone deep.

Nicky wanted to obey her, to pick up the sandwich and chew and swallow like he was supposed to. But his throat worked, and he felt sick at the idea of it.

“I look at this and wonder if she’s feeding him,” he said softly.

Andy nodded, her eyes hollow. “I know.”

“Is she letting him sleep?"

"Nicky."

"Does he think we’ve forgotten him?”

“Don’t.”

Six weeks. Six weeks had gone by in the snap of a finger, and had dragged on so slowly that Nicky felt ancient. He might blink an eye and find that two months had gone by. He might fall asleep that night and wake up to a year without Joe. Never before had he hated the passage of time so much.

Lead after lead was dried. That first list of Copley’s was scratched off, and every brainstorm they had since had gone nowhere.

It was impossible to vanish in the world today. Andy had said that to Copley once. But Kozak had done it. Joe had done it.

“I understand,” Andy said suddenly. “This is hell. I’ve been here before.”

She had. They both had, once Joe and Nicky had found out about Quynh, but Nicky's pain had been nothing to hers. Four hundred years he knew Quynh, while Andy had thousands.

For hundreds of years she had been living with the grief and rage Nicky now felt.

Nicky looked up at her, stark, able to understand her in a way he couldn’t back then. “How did you survive it?” he asked, hoarse.

She met his eyes and smiled, small and sad. “I didn’t, Nicky. There’s no way to. You die. You become someone else, and that person has to go on.”

He reached out, and she gripped his hand tightly.

“Andy!”

She let Nicky go at once, jumping to her feet. Nicky was only a little slower, charging out of the kitchen to the front room on her heels.

Booker held out his phone, showing Copley on its screen. He wasn’t quite smiling, but what was on his face wasn’t distress, either.

Nicky pushed in front of her without even noticing. “What? What’s happened?”

“We found her. Picked her up on CCTV.”

“Where?”

“Here. Walking right into the passport office twenty minutes from where I am now.” Copley looked ready to cry himself. “She’s still in London.”


	6. Chapter 6

They were at dinner one night, late in 2001, shortly after the entire fabric of the world seemed to have changed overnight. They were in Canada, not the US, but already they felt strained there. Joe felt too sensitive in his own skin.

They needed to blend. Always. To be beyond the notice of other people. It was how they survived. Now Joe found for the first time in centuries that his skin and beard and hair suddenly made that impossible.

For the first time in his long life, he had been trying to flatten his accent.

He was pensive about it, ready to talk to Nicky about heading across the ocean to somewhere less hostile, as they sat at this small pho shop and waited for their food.

Nicky had been quiet, too, but he broke the silence first, and it turned out their silences were for very different reasons. “I think I would like that, someday.”

Joe frowned at him, then followed his gaze to the sidewalk beyond the grey window they sat at.

A couple sat at a bus stop across the street, old and withered and saying nothing. There was no one else in view.

He looked back at Nicky. “You want to take the bus?”

Nicky smiled as if Joe was deliberately teasing. “I want to see what silver looks like in your hair, and how deep those laugh lines will get.”

“You have the strangest way of being romantic,” Joe answered, this time definitely teasing.

Nicky shrugged, looking peaceful.

Joe looked back out the window.

There was nothing to show that it was even a couple, it might have simply been a man and woman around the same age who sat at the same time. They didn’t speak, didn’t look at each other. They watched the traffic.

“It looks like they’re bored of each other,” Joe pointed out.

“Mm, after, what, fifty years together? Sixty? Amateurs.”

He laughed, facing Nicky again. “Don’t be smug. It’s not their fault they only have one life.”

“No, it’s not.”

Nicky watched them another minute, which gave Joe time to indulge, to take in Nicky’s profile. There was nothing about Nicky that Joe couldn’t have sketched perfectly even while blindfolded. He was far more familiar with Nicky’s face than his own. There was nothing in this world he had stared at longer.

He wasn’t bored.

“But I bet if he ever looked over and she wasn’t there, he would crumble.” Nicky looked back at Joe, and his smile twitched as he caught Joe staring. He flushed the slightest bit, but leaned in and let his hand rest on Joe’s. “I want to see white in your hair and spots on your hands.”

“And my knees become useless, and my heart go bad?”

“If they must. It’s what everyone else gets to have.”

“’Gets’ to have? You think it’s a blessing?”

Nicky looked at their hands. “I only mean…when it’s our time, I hope we don’t die right away. I hope we get a few more decades to be together.”

Joe’s grin softened. He loved this man so much.

Even when Nicky made it impossible to tease him.

* * *

He had lost count of the days, if he ever had a clear image of them in this windowless room. But one day, if it was a new day since he saw her last, Kozak came in with a spring in her step. She barely glanced his way as she went to drop off her things, to pull on her lab coat and plan whatever tortures she had for him.

Joe watched her. There was nothing else to do.

She came back with her hair up and safety glasses on, and when she looked at him she seemed to really take him in. She approached him, tugged the gag from his mouth for the first time in ages, wrinkling her nose when it came out damp and took skin from his chapped lips with it.

Joe was beyond trying to talk to her. Every inch of his body was depleted. Whatever power was keeping him alive was doing that much and no more. He healed so much slower now that he had to think it might stop eventually.

She turned her back on him, leaving the gag out. “I had an unusual day yesterday.”

He watched her, waiting to see which torture device she chose. He barely listened to her words.

“I was summoned to the passport office for what I was told was immigration business.” She hesitated, hands stilling, and turned back to him without any equipment. Not even her favorite scalpel. “When I got there, they had no record of having contacted me. All my documents were in order.”

Joe watched her hands. Her nails were yellowed from either nicotine or a bad diet, and her skin dry from gloves. She didn’t take care of herself. She spent too much time destroying him.

“Do you know what I think that means? I think it means that your friends actually are looking for you.” She paused, searching his face.

Joe lay there, waiting. Always waiting.

“I think they have found me, or they will very soon.” She approached the bed, lifting one of those dry hands.

He flinched back the inch his straps would allow, looking away fast.

Her fingers smoothed over his cheek in some kind of mockery of gentleness. “I’ll get to find out whether you’re right about the DNA of all people like you, or whether you yourself are simply defective. I should have known better from the start, really. One person is not a sample size.”

He blinked dry eyes, looking back at her.

She smiled. “I bet it will be the Italian. I think he’ll come for you himself, don’t you?”

Oh god.

Joe was beyond thinking of rescue. He was beyond believing he would ever move again, much less be freed to walk out of there. But this. This he hadn’t feared enough.

She would get Nicky, and things would be like they were the first time. Joe would have to watch her do to Nicky everything she’d done to him. Nicky would be trapped there, the way Joe had hoped and feared he would be.

Joe brought this on himself. Brought this on both of them. He had been too selfish, wanted Nicky too much.

Oh god. 

Oh, God.

He shut his eyes, from her interested stare. _Oh God. Oh Allah, glorified and exalted may He be. Aʿūdhu billāhi wa-qudratihi min sharri mā ajidu wa-uḥādhiru._

He was unclean, unworthy, he hadn’t said the prayers in so long. He couldn't speak them out loud now. But they might still be heard. He had nothing else.

 _Please_. _Bismillah. Bismillah. Bismillah_.

* * *

“She spends about twenty minutes inside the office. We can’t get that footage, not from Home Office. But…” Copley clicked at his laptop and got the projection going on the wall.

Nicky’s hands fisted.

She was dressed plainly, her hair down, but he would never forget her face. She stepped outside of the office, a line etched between her brows as she left.

“She looks annoyed,” Nile pointed out, squinting at the footage.

She did. She walked stiffly, irritation squaring her shoulders.

“Watch here,” Copley said, pointing to her suddenly.

All at once she stopped moving down the sidewalk. She looked around, her anger dissolving into something else. Worry, maybe, since she immediately checked for her phone and inside her bag, and suddenly hurried to get to her car.

“She’s nervous.” Andy stood, approaching the wall to get a better look. “You’ve got a theory,” she said to Copley without looking at him.

“I got an email telling me to check this feed,” he said. “Anonymous, sent from a cyber café in New Delhi that doesn’t have cameras. Someone knows we’re looking for her, and wants us to find her.”

“You think they set her up to go in for no reason.”

“Sending her to Central London was most of it, and then pointing me where to look. And I think she realized the set-up right there on the sidewalk. So she knows, she’ll be looking for us.”

“Good.” Booker spoke flatly. “Let her see us coming.”

Nicky turned to Copley. “Do you know where she went after this?”

“I’ve been tracking the footage, finding cameras. I’ve tracked her past Westminster, and I’m guessing she’s going for one of the bridges, but I could use some help.”

“Yeah, you got it.” Nile dropped her overnight bag right where she stood, as ready as the rest of them. “Where do you want us?”

* * *

She set up a second table. She set out a second set of machines, a second table full of instruments. A scalpel, fresh and clean, that she held up for him to see.

“He will give me trouble, yes? But not as much as you did, I think.”

Joe would have laughed at that idea normally. People underestimated Nicky, they always had. He was so good, so soft-spoken, that he was easy to misjudge. Many an enemy had done so, and had met death because of it.

But this wasn’t a normal time, and Joe couldn’t do anything but stare at that empty table and say, in his mind, under his gag, every trace of a prayer he could remember from every religion that worshiped the one God he had known in his first life.

_Protect him. Keep him far from here. I will do anything, everything. Please._

She left him alone once she had the room prepared, but he barely noticed that either. He hurt, he was covered in phantom pain, filled by it. It didn’t matter. He moved his cracked lips against that tight gag, reciting prayers over and over again to try to make up for seven centuries of failing in his devotion.

_Not for me do I ask. For him. Please, for him. I am unworthy, but he. He is the best of men. Keep me here until my final death if you will, but spare him. Bismillah, bismillah, bismillah._

For days, weeks, he had nothing to focus on during the long hours alone except for imaginary conversations with his family. Now he had this table to stare at, to so easily picture Nicky on, bloodied, grimacing in pain. Dying, over and over. Losing pieces of himself.

He squeezed his eyes shut and talked to the Andy in his head, the Nile, the Booker. _Keep him safe, keep him away._

He had suffered these last few weeks in a way he never had before, but that night was by far the worst. There was no strength in him; his body was without reserve, exhausted, depleted. But he lay awake as long as he could, talking to anyone who might hear him from this hell.

* * *

When he woke up, the lights were already on. Kozak was already there, happily busy at the other bed.

At the door, coming through between four of those armed troops, with literal chains at his wrists and ankles, was Nicky.

Nicky, just as Joe remembered him, walking tall and strong amid has captors.

For a moment Joe just looked at him across the room. He saw Nicky’s eyes search him out, saw the look on his face when he saw Joe. A nightmare, Joe hoped, until Nicky’s face seemed to crack open in horror at the sight of him. Then he knew. Not a nightmare. Real.

And Joe’s mind, the one thing Kozak hadn’t yet touched, snapped.

* * *

“You aren’t going to like what I’m thinking,” Andy had said.

And Nicky didn’t. He didn’t at all.

That didn’t stop him from eagerly volunteering, of course. It couldn’t be Andy, and Nile deserved to live more life before being put that much at risk. Booker would have gone, but from the moment the plan was made it was always going to be Nicky.

He had tried to make it happen, when Joe first went missing. He hoped for it. This way, with his team close behind and tracking his movements, was far better.

Still.

Nicky fought when they caught him trying to break in to the home of Doctor Meta Kozak. He fought hard. He shouted and lunged and shoved even as they crammed him into the back of a car with darkly tinted windows and drove him off.

And as he caught his breath, bruised but healing, he smiled. Small, brief enough that nobody noticed, but it was the first smile to cross his face in six weeks.

They took him back across the Thames towards central London, but headed east instead. Nicky didn’t try to follow the route too closely.

One of the men in the front seat pulled out a phone and dialed a number. “It’s me. You were right. He came on his own.” His eyes found Nicky’s through the rearview mirror as he listened to whoever was on the line. “We took his phone, his weapons. No one followed the car.”

Nicky tried to look only sullen in his capture.

“He fought, but he’s calm now. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Ten minutes. Nicky looked towards the window, working hard to school his expression. He was ten minutes away. Ten minutes from either Joe himself or the woman he would cheerfully slaughter to find out where Joe was.

Having no direction for his anger had both blunted its edges and made it deeper, and now was the time to sharpen it up again. These men around him would die. Anyone at this place they were taking him to would die. Doctor Meta Kozak would die harder than all of them.

Nicky was prepared. As they twisted through an unassuming neighborhood of office buildings, Nicky bowed his head and calmed his thoughts, collected himself. These chains they put on him were slightly less convenient than zip ties, heavy and noisy. But Nicky didn’t mind. He wouldn’t get free right away.

But he would get free.

His calmness and surety held up as the car pulled down into an underground garage – which said a lot about how Kozak had stayed so close to London without being caught on CCTV – and parked. He climbed out without protest, looking around the mostly empty garage. Upstairs had been what seemed like an ordinary office building. Nothing he wouldn’t have driven past without a thought.

He was on his best behavior as they stuffed him in an elevator. He noted with some surprise that they went down instead of up, but saw that his captor’s greasy fingerprint was clear enough on the button for anyone following them to see.

He stood in the center of these men, focusing on his breathing. The elevator only dropped a single floor, it felt like, and then the door opened into a blunt hallway with a set of double doors at the end. He could see the sterile counters and refrigerators from where he stood, through the small windows in the doors.

Nicky shut his eyes and breathed, and moved forward when they directed him. Joe, he thought. A mantra. _Joe, Joe, Joe._

It was eerie, how similar this underground room looked to Merrick’s lab. The walls were concrete, the machinery seemed less expensive, but—

Joe.

Nicky’s feet stumbled, and he stopped dead. He drew in a harsh breath.

The filthy skeleton strapped to the table met his eyes, and for a moment Nicky refused to believe it.

He was thin. He was so thin, more than should have been possible in six weeks, unless he had been utterly starved. He was naked, covered in old blood. His hair and beard were outgrown, face half covered with a wide, thick gag, and his eyes were…

Nicky could only stare, horrified.

Joe stared back, but only for a moment. For a moment despair so thick Nicky could feel it seemed to radiate from those wild eyes.

Then he dropped his head back and screamed.

Nicky flinched, forgetting himself and trying to get to his side. The chains at his ankles slowed him, and the men behind him grabbed at him fast.

Joe screamed through the gag, loud and harsh and animalistic. He screamed while the men with Nicky looked around for orders, while the doctor – her, it was _her_ , she was going to suffer before she died, god damn it – hurried around a second empty table and snatched a scalpel off a countertop as she passed. He screamed until blood trickled from the bottom of the gag.

Nicky was just drawing in breath to yell, to stop her, but she moved fast. Her arm slashed out, slicing Joe’s throat open, and cutting those screams off into wet gurgles.

Nicky lunged. “No!” Too late, too many hands on him, but that fury he had been forced to sit on for so long was rising fast.

Kozak glanced his way. “Oh, relax, he’s used to it.” Her eyes flickered to Joe and then dismissed him.

And that…that was too much to bear. That she would capture him, hold him, starve him, kill him, that was enough to enrage anyone. But that she would send him such a contemptuous look, like he was nothing, like he was just some experiment with an inconvenient habit of making noise now and then…

He felt his shoulder pop from its socket as he wrenched his arms free of those men. He lurched towards her, diving to avoid the grasping hands behind him, turning the dive into a roll to keep the chains at his ankles from tripping him.

He slammed into her, shoving her backwards into her own instruments, reaching for her at the same time and yanking her towards him while she was still off balance.

After the first bullet fired behind him, barely scratching his side, Nicky whirled around with the small woman against his chest, his arm looped around her throat.

He couldn’t see. Everything was red, blurred. His ears were filled with Joe’s muffled screams.

Kozak’s hands dug at his arm, fingernails splitting skin as she struggled. He barely felt it. His arm was iron around her, but he didn’t choke her. Not yet.

He looked out at the hazy figures of those guards. “You know I won’t die, and you know she will. Do what you have to.”

There was a pause.

“You can’t kill all four of them before one of them kills you and we can bind you,” Kozak hissed.

“You can burn in hell _,”_ Nicky hissed back, fury making his voice unsteady. He pressed his forearm into her throat, just to show her he could easily take her with him. “I will not die at your hands, not even temporarily.”

“Kill me, then. No one will be left to stop them from capturing you.”

“No one?”

She sucked in a breath, sharp, catching the challenge in his tone. “This was a trap. I told you to throw his phone away,” she cried out, voice thinned by his arm against her throat.

Nicky heard the footsteps approaching, and swallowed down too many emotions to name. They had followed so quickly.

“There are many ways to track people outside of a phone, doctor.”

Nile led the way in, Booker at her side. Andy was right behind them, not nearly covered enough but there was no stopping her. The gunfire was quick, their shots true, and not one of the guards got off a round before they were all on the floor.

Andy moved in instantly. “Are we killing her or bringing her along? This place must be monitored somehow, we won’t have long.”

Nicky couldn’t focus on her. He tightened his arm until he felt her breath gurgling. “I am going to strap her to this table and dissect her slowly,” he answered.

“Nicky. We don’t have—“

“ _Look at him_!” His voice broke, fury hot enough to spill from his eyes in liquid streaks. “ _Look_ , Andromache!”

Andy frowned and looked around.

Nile and Booker were already there, standing near to Joe but too shocked to get closer.

He was still dead. The wound in his throat was half healed but still leaking. Too weak. Too starved and tortured and _weak_. Nicky had lived through famines and sieges and wasting diseases, and Joe should never look like one of those poor victims.

Andy took him in. She looked back at Nicky and at the woman he held. Her face was pale, but quickly getting redder. “We can’t stay,” she said, and her voice was ice cold. “Kill her here or we’ll finish her at the safe house.”

Take her to one of the places they called home? The place where Nicky had slept alone for most of the last six weeks? Impossible.

With a growl, Nicky released her and shoved her away from him. She wouldn’t escape, not with Andy between her and the door.

Behind Andy, Nile was scrambling to unfasten the dozen straps holding Joe to the table. Booker was still distant, grey with sick surprise. But he turned to look at Kozak, and the shock morphed into something hard. He left the table to move to Andy’s side.

Nicky reached out and clasped the handle of the scalpel that had slit Joe's throat.

Kozak looked back and forth between them, her hands half raised. “This is unconscionable. I am a doctor.”

“Are you?” Nicky moved in slowly, chains dragging on the floor, making her stumble closer to Andy and Booker. “Look at your patient. Are you a doctor?”

“My _patient_ will be unharmed in five more minutes.”

Nicky nodded once, though it was clear Joe was nothing like fine. “And you will be a corpse in five minutes, so what does it matter how I treat you now?”

“Nicky.” Andy looked from her to him. “Don’t waste your breath. There’s no conscience to appeal to in this one. Hurry up, and let’s get Joe home.”

Joe.

Nicky approached Kozak.

She flinched back, but Booker slid over and caught her, gripping her arms tightly.

Nicky studied her, but only saw her as she was with Joe. Quick to kill, quick to ignore. Like he truly was one of a million lab rats. Like he was nothing. Joe. Nicky’s Joe.

Andy went back to help Nile, and Booker met Nicky’s eyes grimly over her shoulder. “Do what you have to, brother.”

Nicky looked down at the doctor, at the sour fear on her face. He wanted to scream and slash at her until she was nothing but meat in Booker’s hands.

Instead he met her eyes. “His name is Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn al-Kaysani. Called The Good, called Deathless. Called Defender. Warrior of the Crusades, veteran of over four hundred other wars. Knight of a dozen lands. There are statues in his honor in fifteen nations, and myths about him in most others. He is a scholar, a poet, an artist. He still lives. And you will never trouble him again.”

He slashed quickly, the way she so cruelly slashed at Joe. If the cut was more shallow than hers had been…well, she would just die more slowly. She would feel what it was like to choke on her own blood and it would still be much less than she deserved.

Booker let her fall, and she dropped to her knees. She brought her hands to her throat, gasping, covering the wound as if it would help. Her blood sloughed off her, dripping to the floor.

Nicky looked away from her.

Andy and Nile held Joe supported between them, hanging limp still. Without the straps his unnatural thinness was all the more painfully obvious. Otherwise he looked unharmed, but of course that meant nothing.

Nicky approached, unsure of how to touch, or whether he should. He could hear Joe’s screams still, see the violent despair in his eyes. A thousand years they had been together, and Nicky had never seen him like that before.

“Let’s go,” Andy said tersely. “We’ve got him.”

And they did. They carried him between them easily, like he was insubstantial.

Nicky watched them go, watched Booker charge ahead to open the car.

He looked down at Kozak.

She was prone, eyes wide, mouth moving like a beached fish. They were in a hurry, yes, but Nicky stayed where he was until the shine left her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comic book spoiler here, for the second series:
> 
> The anonymous call to Kozak and the email to Copley? That was absolutely Quynh. If you've read the comic you know she's got her hands in everything by this point, she hears things. 
> 
> She still loves her brother. She wasn't gonna leave him like that.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, if anyone wondered, the title of this story comes from a sweet little indie song about that person who will be with you until the end. [It's cute.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LUzoYZfDDA)

Nicky and Joe had both been raped in their pasts.

They had fought in hundreds of wars, been on the losing side far too often. Victorious soldiers, especially invaders far from their own homes, took their spoils cruelly. It had been that way throughout human history, one of the things that made Nicky despair of his species.

Just one more horror of war, one more brutality, one more invasion. It was a very different kind of pain, Nicky found, than being stabbed or beaten, whipped, tortured. It was personal. Too personal.

Nicolò's last time had been at the end of the 15th century, when he had dragged Yusuf to Genoa to protect it from the French and had waited too long to make a retreat, hours after losing sight of Yusuf in the fighting. He couldn’t die, but immortality did nothing when he was outnumbered and tied down.

Yusuf found him afterwards, and knew. They didn’t talk about it – wouldn’t, in any real detail, for another three hundred years – but they had both been through it before.

Yusuf led him to safety, undressed him, bathed him. Held him. His body healed quicker than his mind, of course, but Yusuf never rushed him. He kissed tears from his eyes, let him rage, left him to sleep alone in safety until Nicolò chose to return to their bed. Even then, for years after, he was careful when he touched. It wasn't a first for either of them, but Yusuf never acted as if he was impatient for Nicolò to get over it. 

“They will not come between us,” he murmured into Nicolò's hair on sleepless nights. “They will not break you.”

And they didn’t.

* * *

They put Joe in the back seat, and Nicky was beside him instantly despite the chains still stifling his movements. Nile slid in on Joe’s other side, and Booker and Andy climbed in the front.

“Not the Cornwall house,” Booker said as she started the engine. “Somewhere closer. He’s not good.”

Andy threw the car in reverse and got them out of the parking garage. “Call Copley, tell him to be ready for guests.”

Nicky stopped paying attention then, with a plan made. He grasped Joe’s limp, thin hand between his and focused on nothing but him.

He was filthy, his skin only clean in select spots, patches on his stomach and thighs where she must have cleaned before she experimented on him. He reeked of unwashed sweat, of old blood. His curls were overgrown and limp, greasy, his beard longer and unkempt. And thin. So thin it hurt to look at, cheekbones sharp at the line of his beard, eyes sunken in.

He was the most beautiful thing Nicky had laid eyes on in almost a millennium of life.

Nicky took him in, head to toe, gulping him down like oxygen until he had even this version of Joe committed to memory. Then he settled in to simply watch his eyes, waiting for him to wake up.

“Will he be okay?”

He couldn’t bear to do more than glance Nile’s way, even after he saw the grief on her face and the tears in her eyes as she looked Joe over. “This will not break him,” he said softly, eyes right back on Joe’s.

“He’s so…”

Andy spoke tightly from the front. “I’ve starved to death a few times. As soon as we get some food into him he’ll improve. It won’t take long.”

“Why doesn’t he heal from that on his own?” Nile sounded very young as she asked, her hand floating over Joe’s side as if wanting to comfort but scared to touch.

“From what I can tell this power we have treats our bodies at the moment of our first deaths as our optimal state, and will always return us to that. But sometimes it needs help. He just needs food. He’ll be very efficient about gaining muscle back. In a week you won't be able to tell anything was ever wrong.”

Joe’s arm at the site of the IV needle had healed. His throat had healed. Nicky watched him, waiting, needing desperately to see something in Joe’s eyes besides that despair and madness earlier.

Even his return to life was weak: a hoarse, indrawn breath and those beloved eyes blinking open.

Nicky clutched his hand. “Joe.”

Joe blinked again, hard. His eyes moved right to Nicky’s face, though he couldn’t seem to focus. He smiled, his lips still cracked and dry.

He spoke, and his voice was tattered, hardly audible. “Questo è il mio sogno preferito.”

Nicky drew in a watery breath and smiled, reaching out to stroke his cheek, ignoring the clink of chains. “Dormi, hayati. Va tutto bene.”

Joe’s glassy gaze swept all over Nicky’s face, but his exhausted body gave in quickly, and his eyes closed again.

Nicky lifted his limp hand and pressed kisses on the knuckles, shutting his own eyes in relief.

“What did he say?” Nile asked, hushed.

“He…thought he was dreaming,” Booker answered when Nicky couldn’t, his own voice thick.

Nicky bowed his head over Joe’s hand, murmuring a soft thanks to whatever gods might have been listening to them the last few weeks. Later, he knew, he would be furious that it took so long, that it happened at all. Later, there would be struggles. Later there would be tears and rage and the endless slog of recovery.

For now he needed to be happy.

* * *

Copley put Joe in his bedroom, wide and light and airy, bed soft and deep. A world away from that lab.

They bathed him first, Nicky and Andy, in the large en suite, careful to the last touch. Andy scrubbed off blood, gentle despite his skin being whole. Nicky washed his hair, combed through his curls, ran fingers through his beard, and he felt reverent.

Joe’s eyes flickered open now and then, but didn’t focus, and didn’t stay open. They got him to swallow some water, but he didn’t speak again.

They settled him in the bed, and Joe curled on his side at first. Nicky left only for the few minutes it took for Booker to pick the locks of those chains at his wrists and ankles, but when he got back Joe was on his back, arms and legs stiff at his sides. Nicky could practically see the straps around him again.

He went to the bed and lay beside him, on his side, watching. Listening to him breathe.

No more empty bed at night. No more looking around for someone who wasn’t there. No more catching himself a dozen times a day wanting to share something, to get Joe’s opinion, to see his reaction to something, but not being able to. No more of this slow suffocation.

He reached out, lay his fingertips at Joe’s elbow. His eyes closed. He dozed.

When he woke again, Joe was watching him. Still on his back, straight and stiff like he was still strapped down, but his head was turned, his eyes focused.

Nicky smiled, and it trembled on his lips.

“I’m gonna close my eyes and wake up with her, and all I fear is that you’ll still be beside me there.” Joe’s voice was better – of course, they healed, it’s what they did – but uneven.

Nicky swallowed, his eyes hot. “And I’ll open my eyes and be alone, terrified because I can’t find you.”

He instantly regretted the words: he should have reassured Joe that it was no dream, that she was cold in death. He should have done anything he had to to make Joe believe it.

But Joe smiled back at him, like enjoying the dream was the only thing that mattered.

Maybe it was.

Joe lifted an arm, looking mildly surprised to be able to move so much.

Nicky wasted not an instant, sliding in against his chest, pressing in alongside him. His knee reflexively curled up over Joe’s leg, cheek resting on his chest.

Joe felt different: sharper, smaller. But Nicky breathed in the smell of his skin and traced a finger over the tiny semicircular scar beneath his collarbone, the one Joe had gotten as a teenager, the one Nicky alone got close enough to see.

He took in the familiar parts of Joe. That scar, the curls of dark hair at the center of his chest. His face, though it was thinned and hollowed, still had those smile lines at his eyes. Still the same lips, now healed of their cracks, taking in Nicky with a sloped smile.

Joe’s arm came down at his back, and Nicky’s eyes squeezed shut.

“I missed…”

He couldn’t get the words out. He choked on them, and that choke became a sob.

Nicky lay his cheek on Joe’s chest and cried hot and bitter tears. Joe’s fingers brushed his back until they fell limp, long minutes later.

* * *

For the second time Joe’s eyes opened to dim sunshine and softness beneath him.

For the second time he tried to shift and his body actually moved, went where he wanted it to.

He looked to the side instantly, remembered Nicky in his arms. But the bed was empty. That part of the dream was too good to last.

But no. He heard murmurs and looked to the other side, to a doorway out of this unfamiliar room. And he knew that back anywhere.

Nicky was talking to someone outside the door, soft and intent.

Joe watched him, the tense line of his spine, the way his arm blocked the door from opening any further than a few inches. His hair was longer than Joe remembered, brushing at the back of his neck. That seemed strange. Should it be that much longer?

Since this was his dream, he didn’t worry about interrupting whatever Nicky was saying.

“Nicolò.”

Nicky turned in mid-word, his entire focus instantly on Joe. He hurried to the bed, sitting on the edge. “Joe. Joe, amore mio. La mia vita.”

Joe laughed softly. He tried to reach out, and his hand actually lifted. Nicky caught it, gripped it tight.

Behind him the door pushed open wider and Booker peered in.

Booker. Joe huffed another soft laugh. His dreams were odd.

Booker looked them over and backed up. “We have to plan, Nicky. It won’t wait.” He shut the door behind him without waiting for an answer.

Nicky ignored him, eyes on Joe’s face. “You need to eat. We’ve ordered food.”

“What is Booker planning?” he asked, since he hadn’t felt hungry in weeks.

Nicky shook his head. “No matter. Logistics. It can wait.”

Logistics. Odd again _._ “Are you safe?”

“Me?” Nicky gave a thin smile, the one that meant he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry so he stifled both urges. “We’re fine. Copley thinks they might be able to follow us here.”

“Who?”

“Whoever was paying Kozak's bills.”

Joe had to think, to sift his flickering brain through the endless time he had been in her custody. “She hasn't said who, it's always just her."

Nicky nodded, taking Joe’s hand in his.

Joe remembered the gesture from before, and was thankful. Though his dreams were odd, they were also kind.

"It has to be someone with real money and real connections. She's been living in a home under the name of a person who doesn't exist. She's been getting money wired to her that we can't trace. And whoever it is, they must have been watching the lab. They might be able to trail us here." 

Joe wished they could go back to laying together, even if it meant feeling Nicky’s tears sliding down his skin. But he tried to focus. “Kozak is after you?”

Nicky’s eyes hardened for a moment. “Kozak is dead, Joe.”

A very kind dream.

“But her conspirators will come after us.”

Joe frowned at that. “Then you should leave.”

Nicky studied him, but answered after a moment. “We will. First you eat, and rest. Copley was CIA, he won’t be so easy to invade.”

“Where will you go? Back to Cornwall?”

“Why do you say ‘you’? We will go wherever we want. Not Cornwall, though. I never want to go back there.”

“Never is a long time,” Joe answered instantly with a smile. It was their standard answer when one of the team talked in nevers and always.

Nicky blinked, and his eyes grew wet.

Joe laughed, reaching his other hand out, marveling when it, too, moved where he wanted it. He stroked under Nicky’s eye carefully. “Stop. I don’t want to dream you crying so much, Nicolò.”

“No?” Nicky drew in a breath and let it out, and his mouth curved in the tiniest of his smiles. “How do you want to dream me?”

Joe thought about that, a million possibilities moving through his mind before he settled on one. “You teased me with Malta before,” he said. “Go there. I’ll follow you.” He sank back against the soft pillow, happy thinking about it. “I’ll be Leander, swimming to you every night no matter where you are.”

Nicky tsked. “Choose a different story. Hero and Leander ended badly.”

Joe’s smile faded. He moved without thinking, bringing his arms back to his sides. “I don’t think I get a good ending, Nicky.”

“Joe.” Nicky went hoarse. “No, my love, you’re here. This isn’t a dream. I found you, I got you back. I swear to you. Everyone is here, we’re safe. You’re safe.”

“Okay.” Joe tried to smile again. “Okay, Nicky. Don’t be upset.”

Nicky shook his head, distress pulling at his eyes. “Food. Food, and water, and see the others. It will feel more real then.”

Joe wasn’t sure he wanted to eat in his dreams and go back to that lab to starve, but he had agreed to harder things to wipe grief from Nicky’s face before. “Okay.”

Nicky left his side and went to the door.

Joe watched him go, wondering.

* * *

Andy gripped Nicky’s arm before he could loft the tray and head back to the bedroom. “Nicky.”

He waited, resenting the pause.

“Hey.” She waited until he met her eyes, and searched his expression with those old, old eyes of hers. “Take this slow.”

He frowned. “Take what slow?”

“All of it. You’ve both been through a lot, and for us that can be…” She swallowed, hand tight at his bicep. “It can be hard. We heal too fast.”

Nicky nodded, mostly to get her hand off of him. “Give me ten minutes, then come in. He’s confused, he needs to see all of you.”

Her mouth creased, not satisfied by his answer. But she nodded once and let him go.

Copley’s house was very nice, he noted absently as he moved though the wide front room towards the master bedroom. London was expensive. Government service paid well, apparently.

Copley and Booker were sitting at his desk, peering solemnly at a computer screen, and Nicky passed without a word. He wondered - perhaps unfairly, but ah well - how much of this nice home had been paid for by Merrick, or others who made similar deals.

The bedroom door was cracked open, and Nicky moved fast when he noticed. Joe had no strength to walk away, did he? He would have been seen, or…

Nile stood inside the door, at the wall. She was staring at the bed, even after Nicky hurried in. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just had to check.”

She was so young. Strong, level, grounded, but so so young.

Nicky softened. He nodded at the bed, at Joe lying so still, eyes closed again. “Go, talk to him.”

She looked over with liquid eyes, but pushed off the wall and approached the bed. Nicky moved with her, going to the other side. He slid the tray to the empty space beside Joe and sat on the edge.

“Joe. Wake up, mio amato.”

Joe’s eyes opened instantly, as if he’d been awake the whole time. He turned his head to see Nicky first, before looking to his other side.

He smiled in surprise. "Nile."

"Joe."

“Hey.”

She sniffled, grinning back. “Hey.”

“Your hair.” He studied her critically. “You’re growing out of these braids.”

Nile laughed. “You’re late for the next lesson, jerk. Flat twists, not that easy.”

“I can’t wait.”

She glanced at Nicky, who watched them hopefully.

Nile and Joe got along incredibly well from the start. Joe had an enthusiasm and energy to teach her, and to learn from her own life, that Nicky and Andy couldn’t match. He had eagerly volunteered to learn to care for her hair when he found out that it was far more complicated for her than any of the rest of them. They talked art for hours at a time. Joe teased her by telling her massive lies about the past, and she teased him by pretending to believe him.

One month in and they had become solid brother and sister, which Nicky felt had done a lot to make up for Nile’s incredibly violent introduction to immortality.

His disappearance hadn’t been easy on her, but while Joe was gone Nicky was too distracted to appreciate it, to talk to her about it. He had resented her training, the knowledge she had that he didn’t. He had been self-centered, had ignored his family’s pain.

Yet she had prayed for him.

“—to know where you were.”

He blinked back to attention in time to hear Nile’s voice crack.

Joe reached out for her, sitting up easily. The first real movement Nicky had seen him make since he woke up.

“It’s okay. The world is big. I won't blame you, even if you never find me.”

Nile drew back, brow furrowed.

Nicky forced a quiet laugh, though there was nothing funny about this. “Still so sure you’re dreaming.”

He reached for the tray, and his eye caught on his own hand. Instantly he forgot about Nile, looking down at the silver ring that he had worn all these weeks. He had never been one for jewelry, but he hardly noticed the rings anymore.

Joe had wanted to make him one, all those centuries ago. He would have designed it himself. It would have meant so much.

How Nicky regretted saying no to that.

He swallowed, sliding the first ring, the one Joe had helped design, from his own finger. “Here,” he said, reaching for Joe’s hand. “Maybe this will make you feel more yourself.”

The ring slid on to Joe’s thin finger far too easily.

Joe looked down at it. He lifted his hand closer to his eyes, flexing his fingers, and then looked past it at Nicky.

Nile cleared her throat. “Right, I’m gonna grab some lunch. I’ll come back, Joe.”

Joe nodded without looking at her. He searched Nicky’s face, intent, as Nile slipped off the bed and left quietly.

Nicky held up his other hand, with Joe’s second ring gleaming on his finger. “I kept them both safe for you,” he said. He started to slide that ring free as well.

Joe reached out and caught his fingers. “Keep it longer. It suits you.”

He blinked itching eyes, willing himself not to cry again and upset Joe. He curled his fingers, letting the ring settle back into place.

“Nicky…” Joe reached out tentatively. His fingertips brushed against Nicky’s fingers, feather light, and then up to his jaw, his cheekbone.

Nicky hardly dared to breathe.

Joe swallowed. “You feel real.”

Nicky nodded, curling his hand around Joe’s outstretched arm. “I’m here. You’re here. I won’t leave your sight until you believe it. She’s dead and you’re with us.”

Joe thought about that, watching his own fingers trace Nicky’s face. “She’s dead?”

“I did it myself. Some killings I regret, but hers will never be one of them.”

“You…where did you find me?”

Nicky laughed, bitter and drawn. “London. So close to us this whole time.”

“London.” Joe’s brow furrowed.

He needed details, to make it real. Nicky could see that. But before he could start talking telling Joe the entire sad, furious tale of their hunt for him, the bedroom door opened again.

Andy came in, Nile at her side. Behind then, perhaps feeling less welcome, were Booker and Copley. Nicky wanted to glare at them until they left, but he had asked for this himself.

Andy looked carefully at Joe, and at Nicky. “Seriously? He hasn’t even eaten yet?”

A moment’s annoyance slashed through Nicky, but it was a fair point. “Right. Joe, we ordered you lablabi and lamb, and I expect you to judge it very harshly.” He slid the tray between them.

Joe’s eyes were on his team, going from one to the next carefully, not slowing or changing expression for any of them, even Copley.

“Joe.” Andy moved in and sat herself where Nile had been. “Food. Focus.”

Joe’s focus went to her, and he smiled faintly. “Boss. You look good.”

Andy swallowed, reaching out and touching his shoulder. “You look like shit. I mean, you really look like pan-seared _shit_ , Joe.”

He laughed, but there was still something distant in the sound.

His eyes went to Nicky again, just for a moment, and then turned to the tray of lukewarm food.


	8. Chapter 8

The game started with a visit to Russia in the late 19th century, where they had wandered in curiosity after the Crimean War and stayed until Alexander III started getting a little too zealous about outsider influence in his country. An interesting period, all in all.

One day they sat listening to a rendition of 'Картинки с выставки', a new Mussorgsky suite.

“He will outlive Tchaikovsky,” Iosif whispered to Nikolai at the time.

Nika laughed. “We are ten minutes into this, my love, save your guesses.”

Iosif could tell that Nika disagreed but he sat back to listen, having the patience to wait and argue later.

“Tchaikovsky is less Russian,” Nika did disagree later, as they rode a troika to their small but warm little home on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg. “He will spread further.”

“You mean he’s more European. That won’t always be the standard for success, you know.”

“You think they will prefer Mussorgsky in the Meghrab?”

“I think Western Europe has gotten dull, that’s all.”

“Osa, heart, Tchaikovsky is not dull. He will last.”

Fifty years later it was clear Nicky had won that bet.

In that time it also become a favorite game between the two of them, wherever they went: which artist or style or genre around them would survive the test of time? It was a game they had to have a few centuries of hindsight behind them to appreciate. They alone among a handful of others knew what it was like to see history made and then see it _become_ history.

Of course they turned it into a game.

They both had a hard time guessing authors: most of their favorites fell into irrelevancy, to their dismay. Nicky won many of the musical guesses, but Joe had an eye for visual art. Picasso, O’Keefe. He was vehement that Basquiat would outlast his contemporaries: Nicky just complained that he couldn’t tell what anyone was even trying to do with art anymore.

“When Jean-Michel died I almost lost faith,” Joe reported to Nile once over dinner. (The truth was he fell into a dark depression that lasted a couple of years, but Nicky was kind enough not to correct him.) “But the art survived all the same.”

Nicky just smiled when Nile sent him her inevitable ‘just how full of shit is he?’ look. “We knew him weeks only, a few years before he died.”

“Nicky’s the one he wanted to sleep with,” Joe confided to her. “All that sweet sadness of his, artists adore it.”

“You could have slept with Basquiat?” Nile gaped at Nicky, looking more impressed in that moment than she had been about any other point in their long history.

Nicky shrugged, flushing lightly. “I had to come even with Joe, he’s the one who caught Freddie Mercury’s eye just a year or two before that.”

“No fucking way.”

Joe beamed. Freddie hadn’t been part of their bet: Freddie, Edith Piaf, Caruso, Nina Simone…sometimes they were lucky enough to see people they both instantly knew would be great.

It wasn’t all war, this living through the centuries. Sometimes it was art, music. Love. Years of it. 

Nile hadn’t bought it. “ _Damn_ it,” she answered, pushing away from dinner in a huff. “Will you stop telling me things like this? I don’t know how to tell when you’re lying.”

“We’ll talk about it again in twenty years, you’ll know us better,” Joe agreed cheerfully. He took a moment to admire the slight touch of pink that remained on Nicky’s cheeks before getting back to his meal.

* * *

For the third time, Joe woke up in a soft bed.

The sunlight was gone, faded into darkness. But Nicky was there, sleeping at his side, so it was a fair trade.

He felt hungry, and warm. He had yet to wake up for real, back on that table.

Maybe, Joe thought to himself, maybe it wasn’t a dream.

Maybe he had gone crazy instead. Maybe he was in that lab even then and she was injecting poison into his IV or holding a lighter to his side or dripping acid over and over against the same inch of skin, wanting to see how deep a hole she could make…but Joe’s mind was gone, and had brought him into this fantasy, and he would never feel her again.

He smiled at the possibility, reaching out without fear that invisible straps would stop him. He brushed strands of too-long dark hair from Nicky’s sleeping face.

Nicky woke up instantly, always a light sleeper. He didn’t even look around, just turned right to Joe and rolled on his side when he saw him awake.

“Hayati,” he murmured.

Joe smiled. The old familiar nickname never failed to make him happy. Nicky spoke in Italian as a first choice, English and French were for when the team was together. Arabic was solely to please Joe.

Joe studied Nicky. It was dark, but the wide windows let in some light from outside, and the shadows made Nicky look far more tired than Joe had noticed before. Before, he had only been beautiful. Now he looked worn.

“Why is Booker here?” Joe asked quietly.

Nicky slid his arm under his head to peer at him. “Are you upset?”

“No.” Joe wasn’t anything, he didn’t think. Not yet. “But…if it doesn’t make sense then I’m dreaming. Or insane.”

Nicky’s eyes widened in understanding. “We called him for help. His computers and tracking, Nile doesn’t know his tricks. How could I care about grudges when you were gone?”

Joe hummed thoughtfully.

“You would have done it, if it was me they took away.”

He would, but Joe couldn’t agree out loud. The words themselves sent a cold shiver through him, and he remembered the fear that Nicky was coming, that they would get him. That he would suffer.

He frowned, remembering more. “Did you…you _were_ there.”

“I had to let them catch me to find you. The others were right behind me, and Copley gave me a tiny tracker, in my shoe. I was careful.”

Joe let out a breath, fear keeping him cold. “That was dangerous,” he said, voice unsteady.

“Worth the risk,” Nicky answered easily.

Joe shook his head. “Dangerous.”

“You would have done it for me,” Nicky said again.

There wasn’t a way to argue with that.

Joe looked past him into the darkness. “How long?”

Nicky swallowed, audible in the stillness. “Six weeks and four days and almost two hours until I found you.”

Six weeks. Did that make sense? It felt longer, but…it would, wouldn’t it?

His mouth twisted. “If you told me six months I would believe you. Six weeks…”

“A lifetime, Joe.” Nicky pushed to sit up.

“But...” Not even two months. They had taken longer than two month to travel somewhere just because one of them was craving a particular meal before. Two months was nothing.

“No buts. How many lives did you live in that time? How many deaths did I miss?”

Joe dropped onto his back. “Nicky…”

“How many?”

Joe breathed in, let it out slowly. “I lost count.”

Fifteen or so that first day. None at all, for a long period in the middle where she refused to let him die just to see the various ways he would knit together again while still aware. When she got frustrated with that finally she walked up to him, pinched his nose shut, covered his mouth, and stared into his eyes as he died.

So many deaths. Hundreds.

Joe swallowed, shutting his eyes. “Tell me, Nicky. Tell me I’m here, tell me it’s real.”

“Joe…” Nicky moved instantly, sliding back to lay again, sliding close to gather Joe in his arms and pull them together.

Joe was tense at first. Whether it was six weeks or six years, he had gotten used to touch only hurting.

Nicky lay shaking against him, murmuring his reassurances but with his mouth pressed to Joe’s shoulder, inaudible. And so Joe relaxed, because Nicky needed comfort.

He rolled awkwardly onto his side, unpracticed with the movement but laying with Nicky was muscle memory. It was what his body was supposed to do. Nicky adjusted, slotted against him. For a moment he let his face rest against Joe’s shoulder, but then he moved up, he slid his arms around Joe and pulled Joe to lean against him instead.

“Real, Joe,” he kept saying, no longer muffled. “I promise. I would never lie to you. Not even in dream, not even if you were insane and making me up. I could never hurt you by deceiving you. You’re here with me, you’ll never be back there. Please, Yusuf, please. Be here with me.”

Joe shut his eyes and buried his nose in Nicky’s shirt, inhaling the scent of him, so utterly familiar. He felt Nicky’s arms around him, felt his words fall down on his skin and soak in. 

If it wasn’t real, if he did wake up and see her waiting for him, he would shut his eyes again and dream up this moment for himself. She could have his body, but she wouldn’t take this.

* * *

When Joe next spoke, Nicky was back to half asleep, still clutching Joe to him like a child with a beloved toy animal.

“I want to get up.”

Nicky tightened his grip for a second, then pulled back: much as he wanted to stay close forever, Joe wanted something. Nicky had no choice but to give him it. He pressed his mouth to Joe’s hair as he went, though. “You want…?”

Joe stared straight ahead, gaze floating around Nicky’s collarbone. “I want to stand up. It’s been so long since I stood.”

Every detail Nicky learned about Joe’s time away from him made his hands itch to slice Kozak’s throat one more time.

An unproductive feeling. He pushed it back, sitting up quickly. “Yes, okay. You must be hungry again. We can go make you some food.”

Joe’s eyes lifted to his face. “Okay.”

“Maybe the bathroom first?”

Joe smiled. “Yeah. Better.”

Nicky returned the smile, hurrying out of bed and moving around to Joe’s side. He pushed at the sheet tangled around Joe’s legs, holding out his arm, exaggeratedly gallant. “My love.”

Joe would have rolled his eyes once, always looking so fond of Nicky in his sillier moments. But now he seemed focused only on sitting up, on swinging his legs out of bed. He did reach for Nicky’s arm, bracing himself.

In the end standing seemed easy. In Joe’s mind maybe he ought to have been atrophied and weak, but of course he had an immortal’s body. His muscles were thinned, but wouldn’t have held on to the weakness.

Physically, Nicky amended as he watched Joe’s face. Physically it seemed easy.

Joe looked down at himself for a long moment, but then his eyes lifted, his mouth pressed thin in that way that meant he was going to be stubborn about something, and he took one step, and then another.

Nicky guided him towards the en suite, but when Joe let his arm go he stopped moving, watching silently as Joe took careful steps that got more confident even in the short walk to the bathroom door.

Joe didn’t look back, but he didn’t close the door. He turned on the light and then vanished inside.

Nicky stood there, undecided. He looked around the room, but there was nothing to be done. No busywork to occupy him now that Joe was out of his sight.

He went to the bed, straightening the single sheet unnecessarily. The toilet flushed behind him.

Silence fell.

Nicky sat down on the bed. Then he stood up. He watched the doorway, hands toying together restlessly, waiting.

Joe told him often how good he was with people in pain. How nurturing and big-hearted. Nicky did have an instinct to want to fix hurts, it was true. But he was only good when there was fixing to be done. When there was real help he could offer.

This was outside his experience. He didn’t know where to start. This he was not good at.

“Should I get you some food and bring it back here?” he called after too long a pause.

There was silence.

He went to the door to the bathroom, not wanting to intrude but Joe had been out of his sight for minutes and that was too long. “Joe? Should I get…”

Joe was standing there, meeting his own eyes in the wide mirror over the sink. He was frozen.

Nicky moved in behind him, careful. He looked at Joe’s reflection, the sunken angles of his face and the wild hair and beard, the jutting collarbones and thinned chest. The hipbones barely holding up the loose borrowed pajama pants he’d been dressed in.

Nicky wanted to sob all over again, but perhaps it was time he stopped indulging himself that way.

He lay hands on Joe’s sharp shoulders carefully, only settling there when Joe didn’t tense or flinch away. He looked at Joe’s eyes through the glass, but Joe seemed lost, looking at himself like a stranger.

Nicky swallowed and looked around the bathroom. It was lived in, full of Copley’s things, and Nicky spotted a small black bag on a shelving unit behind them. He let Joe go to go get it, glad when it turned out to be just what he wanted.

So much detritus to shave a man these days, he thought, remembering the days they used a sharpened knife and a lot of prayers. Still, it meant there was a small pair of shears in the kit. 

“Joe.” He moved in behind Joe again, taking his arm carefully. “Come, my heart.”

Joe went where he was guided. Nicky shut the lid to the toilet and sat him down, standing over him with an appraising gaze. “Imagine, my vain beloved in this state.”

Joe's eyes were empty.

Nicky went to work, combing carefully through Joe’s curls, cutting away at the too-long ends. He was not especially talented at this, even after a few hundred times attempting it. His own hair he could cut in his sleep. But Joe’s curls were complex, and Nicky feared ruining them no matter how much Joe laughingly reminded him that hair grew back, even after the worst mangling.

Still, though he wouldn’t make Joe look his best, he would make him look better. More like himself.

As he worked, snipping bit by bit, studying the way the hair lay and how it curled, Joe’s unseeing gaze focused on him again slowly. He looked at the scissors, and Nicky’s hand, and then his eyes found Nicky’s face and stayed there, no matter how inconvenient it was that he wouldn’t keep his head still.

Nicky had to give up with the back undone, but already Joe was more familiar to him. Besides, it was no hardship to drop to his knees on the tile in front of Joe and focus instead on his beard.

He and Joe had seen each other through a thousand iterations. Joe had lived years with a shaved head and clean face, or with hair so long he had to tie it back, or a beard so great he had to tuck it into his shirt when he ate to keep the crumbs out. Just as Nicky had had every manner of facial hair and every length of hair.

They kept to the styles of the world around them, usually. These days the world was very connected, and style became more a matter of choice. Nicky preferred a smooth face, liked his hair long enough to be grabbed and tugged but not much longer.

Joe didn’t much care about his hair either way, so he kept it long enough to curl because it was what Nicky loved. His beard, though, he very much liked to keep a specific way. Longer than Booker's artful stubble, but not too long. Just the right thickness that it was soft against bare skin. Maybe a shade longer, because he had never outgrown seeing a full beard as a sign of masculinity and maturity.

This was too long, this beard he had now. Untrimmed, badly shaped.

Nicky spent far more time on the beard than he had on Joe’s hair. He focused on his hands, the hair sifting between his fingers, the overall shape of the beard as it curved down Joe’s cheek and over his jaw.

He was aware of Joe’s eyes on him the whole time, but if he met Joe’s gaze then he would never look away, so he concentrated only on the beard. 

It was easier than his hair: Nicky spent so much time staring at this face that he thought he could have managed it with his eyes closed. He set the scissors down finally, running fingers along the sides of Joe's face to make sure he didn’t miss any patches.

“Better,” he decided finally, sitting back on his heels. “Want to see?”

Joe nodded.

Nicky took his arm, pulling him up. He moved Joe back to the mirror, staying right behind him. He could see the parts he missed at the back of his head, but it didn’t matter right then. What mattered was Joe taking in his own reflection with something besides blankness.

He still didn’t look like himself. He wouldn’t until the forty pounds of muscle Kozak had starved from him returned. With his hair shorter, the sunkenness in his eyes and the angles of his cheekbones were even more pronounced.

But Nicky was content.

Joe met his own eyes for a long moment, but turned his head slightly to look at the rest, the hair and beard. He reached up and toyed at his hair. “You like it too long.”

Nicky smiled. “I know.”

Joe huffed a soft breath. His hand dropped. His gaze in the glass went from himself to Nicky, and he swallowed. “Forgive me.”

Nicky’s smile vanished. He stepped close behind him, hands on his arms.

Joe went on like the words were painful, scratching their way out of his throat. “I wanted to die. I lost hope.” He blinked, and his eyes went liquid bright. “Only six weeks, and I wanted—“

“Joe, please. Dio.” Nicky shut his eyes, leaning in to rest his head against Joe’s hair. “Forgive me that it was six whole weeks before I found you.”

“I love you.” Joe turned, sinking against him. “I talked to you every night, every moment I was alone. I love you so much, Nicolò.”

Nicky had wanted, in the back of his mind where he tossed around such concepts, for their first kiss after so long apart to be gentle and warm and comforting. But his mouth found Joe’s without his brain’s permission, and Joe kissed back desperately, and they were both breathing so raggedly.

“I love you, Yusuf,” he said in the moments between. The kisses started to taste salty, and he wasn’t sure which of them the tears came from. “I love you. I…my _life_ …you’re…” He tried to kiss and talk at once, and it was a mess but something inside of him that had been wild for two months settled back. “I don’t know who I am without you.”

Joe’s hands were clawed at his chest, digging into his shirt. “Nicky—“

There was a pounding, a sudden loud knock at the bedroom door beyond.

Nicky flinched back as if pulled, fury instant and hot. He found himself instantly in the bedroom, marching towards the door with hands fisted. “Butana! Can we not get an hour of peace? Figlio di _puttana_. La prossima bastarda che ci interrompe lo farà—“

The door burst open, and Nicky stopped in his tracks to see Andy and Copley both spilling in. Andy was wide awake, but Copley had creases on his face and looked bewildered.

“Nicky, we gotta go. Now.”

Nicky turned instantly back to the bathroom. “Joe?”

Joe came out, taking them all in and then snapping into fighter mode, thin shoulders squaring and face showing no weakness. “Who found us?”

Copley answered grimly. “There are two options, and neither are good.”

“Get dressed. No time to pack up anything.” Andy hesitated, looking Joe over fast. She nodded approvingly at Nicky before heading back out the door. “Two minutes, we’re in the car.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big note this chapter:
> 
> It was pointed out to me this past week (well, pointed out in general, but I am guilty) that Kozak was given no background info in canon, and that choices like this matter. By writing her as Romanian, and then focusing specifically on that aspect of her, I was sending a message.
> 
> It was thoughtless and unnecessary. She’s evil because she is immoral and a torturer. It is entirely separate from whatever her background may have been.
> 
> So if you go back and read from the beginning, you’ll note that almost every chapter has been changed. Any reference to her nationality is gone, and a few of their conversations have been amended. The spirit is the same, of course. She’s the same monster, and her joining up with a shadowy government secret service is the same, though now we don't know which government it is. It’s not necessary to reread it at this point if you’re following along as I write.
> 
> But for future chapters, and future readers, there’s gonna be no more of that xenophobic nonsense. I apologize that it was ever included.
> 
> Also sorry for the wait on this one. We're at the awkward between-things stages and those have to be muddled through.

One of the advantages of immortality was the ability to indulge in risky behavior without having to judge the value of the risk.

Nicolò, for instance, had an open fascination with animals that could easily kill him. It had been giving Joe ulcers for centuries, ever since the first time, maybe ten years into their travels, that Nicky had tried to pet a crocodile and lost his hand for it.

“I wanted to know how it felt,” was his unapologetic explanation when he had recovered enough that Joe felt comfortable yelling at him for being an absolute idiot. “It was warmer than I guessed.”

For Nicky, that was a sufficient answer. How else would he have ever known that a crocodile’s rough skin was warm? Losing a hand that would heal itself was worth gaining the knowledge.

It was part of what made Nicky who he was, this fascination with the world. He had a curiosity and interest in everything that Joe couldn’t match. He loved to listen to people talk about absolutely nothing for hours on end. He loved experiencing places and hobbies, diving in and then diving back out if they didn’t take, and moving right on to the next thing.

And, damn him, he loved sticking his hands close to the open mouths of deadly beasts.

The first time they were in Tanzania, Joe practically had to tie Nicky down to keep him from bounding off into the Serengeti to pet the kitty cats.

“You give me anxiety,” Joe informed him after Nicky was taken in by a documentary on television and started looking up how he could be locked in a cage and dropped under water to play with sharks.

But for the most part he let Nicky get on with losing pieces of himself, because when it went well Nicky was never happier.

He often thought fondly of the time he woke up on the hard dry soil of a long-dead riverbed in Iran to find Nicky rummaging around in their bags.

“What sort of food do you suppose wolves like?”

Joe, not at his best when freshly woken up, scowled at him. He didn’t even have to wonder if it was a hypothetical question.

“You,” he answered gruffly. He tried to roll over and sleep again, but that was never going to happen if he thought Nicky was outside being digested by creatures. So of course he pushed himself up and out of their sleeping bags and staggered through the tent opening, and was instantly wide awake.

Nicky was three feet away, crouching though the wolf staring at him through the dark had to be a meter tall. Nicky made little tutting noises, holding out the leftover taftan that Joe had been planning to have for breakfast.

The wolf’s ears went back when Joe appeared, so he stood frozen to keep from setting it off.

It took a couple of minutes, but the wolf loped restlessly, pacing from side to side but always coming a little closer.

“That’s it, you beauty,” Nicky murmured in Persian. The wolf’s nose worked, his eyes went from the offered bread to Nicky’s face and back.

Finally it came in close, the front of its body low to the ground, and with gentle teeth it plucked the bread from Nicky’s hand. Then it loped away again, vanishing off into the darkness.

Joe let out a breath, heart re-starting. “Sorry you didn’t get to pet it, you maniac.”

Nicky straightened and looked over, and Joe’s breath was forced out of him at the sight of the wide, brilliant smile on his face. “Someday.”

* * *

“There are alerts put on retired CIA agents,” Copley told them as they sat crammed into the small hotel room at the first place they had been able to pay cash. “A group of agents unofficially keep track, just to make sure our pasts don’t come back to haunt us. Someone is researching me, has my address.”

“Okay,” Andy was grave, hovering close to Joe as he slowly ate the lukewarm curry she’d made Booker stop for once it was clear that they weren’t actively being followed. “So they did have a way to track us back to you.”

“That’s the logical assumption,” Copley said. “And it means that whoever Kozak is working for, they either have government connections or access to some pretty top level hackers.”

“Whoever Kozak _was_ working for,” Nicky corrected flatly.

Joe glanced over at him, sitting pressed against his side.

Nicky gazed out at Copley, face neutral.

“Right. Was. I have to believe it’s a governmental power: that’s the simplest explanation, and if I’m thinking about wealthy far-reaching civilian groups with hackers and the desire to fund medical experimentation, nobody comes to mind.”

“When you say government, do you mean _government_ government or, like, some shadowy government agency that might be acting on their own?” Nile asked from the second bed, where she and Booker and the remains of their own dinner sat.

Copley hesitated. “I wouldn’t want to jump to any conclusions.”

“You were CIA, James, you’re not a naïve man,” Andy said sharply.

He sent her a look that was just as sharp. “You people live by your own rules. In my life it’s dangerous to lob unfounded accusations against an entire government, no matter which nation we’re talking about.”

“Well, look around.” She gestured at the hotel room, the group sitting with them. “You’re in our world now. Fuck etiquette. Tell us how much trouble we’re in.”

A fair bit of trouble, it turned out.

“To be frank, it’s semantics. If it were, say, MI-6, you’d be just as screwed as you would if they were trading photos of you in the halls of parliament. Someone knows, either about Joe or about all of you. They tracked us, which meant they were probably watching the lab the whole time. I have to assume Kozak gave them details as she worked.”

“So they probably have proof. Footage of…” Andy glanced at Joe, and her voice softened. “Of whatever she did to Joe.”

Joe set the half-full carton of curry to the side. Nicky’s hand rested against the small of his back.

“That’s a safe assumption,” Copley answered, his eyes flickering to Joe and then back to Andy. “The good thing about that is that video is unreliable these days. There is absolutely no way to prove that something on film is true, between practical effects, film tricks, altered footage. Video has gone from the most incontrovertible evidence possible to being basically garbage.”

“Could she have…other proof? Something physical?”

Joe glanced at Nile, the worried gaze she kept turning his way. He huffed. “You haven’t lost a body part yet, right.”

She frowned. “What does…?”

“Anything we lose,” Booker said, “tends to vanish. First time I lost a finger I saved it, thought maybe I’d burn it and keep the ash, God only knows why. I put it in a cigar box and it was gone in hours.”

“Gone?”

“Dissolved away to nothing,” he nodded. “Even our blood tends to corrupt itself once its outside of us long enough.”

“That much I knew,” Copley said. “After Sudan, there wasn’t a single usable blood sample in that room that didn’t come from one of Merrick’s hired guns.”

“Might interest you to know,” Booker directed to Nile and Copley both, “that if our heads are cut off we don’t grow new ones.”

Copley looked a little too grey to be interested. “Wait, is that…it actually kills you?”

Booker laughed. “No. We grow completely new bodies out of the first head. Which seems inefficient, really, but apparently as far as this power of ours goes our heads are what make us us, and the bodies are disposable.”

“Mm, it takes forever, too,” Andy said. “Beheadings are top five worst deaths.”

“Exactly how many of you have lost heads?” Copley asked.

“Those two and me,” Andy answered. “Somehow Booker avoided the guillotine.”

Booker smiled innocently.

“Okay, so.” Copley looked from Booker to Andy to Joe and Nicky in the bed, as if he could determine if they were full of it or not. He might have been an ally but the man was still very much an outsider.

Joe looked back at him evenly.

“Right.” Copley shifted in his chair. “So, the point is that even if she…took some kind of proof, it would be no use to her?”

“Right.”

“Did she?”

Joe swallowed and looked over at Nicky.

Nicky looked back, mouth tight, hand comforting at Joe’s back despite the fire in his eyes. “Did she?” he asked again.

Joe looked away. “Does it matter?”

“Joe…”

“Later.” Andy cut them off, thankfully. “How do we find out who this is and what they know? And what do we do about it?”

Joe tried to focus, he really did. But the adrenaline of going on the run in the middle of the night was running out, and his head wasn’t up to this kind of planning.

Everything felt realer than it had. The odds of this being some fever dream were basically nil at this point, and his mind seemed to have accepted that. Didn’t quite rule out insanity yet, of course. But whatever it was, he was in it.

The food helped, he thought, though he had no urge to eat more. He could feel the hollow corners in his chest start to fill up. Like he was healing inside, slowly but undeniably.

He didn’t like brushing Nicky off or dismissing his questions, but the last thing he wanted to do was talk about Kozak and all she had done to him. He could remember the horror on Nicky’s face, deep and wrenching, when he first saw Joe laying in that lab. He didn’t ever want to see that again.

Joe protected Nicky. It’s what he did. Of course the idea of it was ludicrous, because Nicky was every bit as formidable and protective as Joe was, but it’s how they had always been. Joe protected Nicky, and if what Nicky was doing in the meantime was protecting Joe too…well, that worked out well for them.

But protecting him meant being strong when there was no fighting. It meant not saddling his love with details that could only hurt him and never help.

Later, when it was less fresh, Joe would tell Nicky every single moment of his time with her. Slowly, in doses, but he would eventually speak about all of it. He had no sense of shame or pride that could outweigh his love and trust in Nicky, and he respected him far too much to keep him in the dark.

Just…not now. Not while danger was still near, and Nicky still looked gaunt and hunted from his time looking for Joe.

Nicky squeezed his knee suddenly, and Joe blinked and looked around to see all eyes on him. Shit.

“Yeah, sorry, I’m…” He gestured at his head idly. “What’d you say?”

“I think that answers it well enough,” Andy said, frowning at him before turning back to Copley.

Shit. Shit, shit. Joe sat up straighter, listening. Trying to listen.

“So I think we’re agreed that Joe ought to sit the rest of this one out. Maybe he and Nicky both, since Kozak might have records of Nicky, too.”

“What?” Joe started to push to his feet, but Nicky’s hand tightened on his leg, and he contented himself with glaring out at Andy. “No fucking way.”

“Joe.” She frowned. “You’re recovering. These people know your face. It’s easier for us if you stay safe.”

It was nothing they hadn’t done for each other before. There were times when the endless fight got to be too much, and they needed breaks. Joe had asked for it once or twice, at low points. So had Nicky. So had Andy.

It wasn’t an insult. Nobody would doubt Joe because of it.

But he hadn’t asked, he was being volunteered. It felt like a knife in the back. “I have every right to go after these assholes. More right than any of you have.”

“Yeah?" Andy faced him, her expression blank. “Finish one meal. Focus for more than ten seconds. Prove you’re up for it. You really think you can watch our backs like this?”

“Andromache.” Nicky answered that, his voice sharp. “I want him to be safe, too, but you go too far. He could fight even now if he had to.”

“God damn it.” She approached Joe, and he could see the worry bleeding through her eyes. “You _don’t_ have to. We can fight this one for you.”

Joe scowled, Nicky’s support bolstering him. “I don’t need you avenging me like I died in that room. I didn’t. I survived, I’m out.”

Nile spoke up then, sounding like she was already regretting it. “You believe that now? Or do you still think this is a dream?”

Joe wheeled to the other bed to direct his scowl at her. He opened his mouth to retort.

Nicky squeezed his knee. “Don’t say things you’ll regret,” he murmured in Genoese.

Joe might have included Nicky in his retort, but he could see the glitter of worry in Nile’s eyes, and his words died in his throat. He looked to the side.

Nicky’s gaze was calm, level. Supportive, no matter what.

Joe got to his feet. “I need some air.”

“Joe.” Copley stood from his chair near the door. “We don’t know what kind of surveillance these people have access to. You especially shouldn’t be outside right now.”

“God damn it,” Joe hissed out, a particularly harsh curse in the old Arabic he used. He turned and marched past Nicky’s worried eyes and Andy’s cool stare, Nile’s fearful face, Booker’s silence.

He slammed the door to the bathroom behind him.

* * *

Nicky gave his lover credit for a substantial sulk: it was over an hour before the bathroom door creaked open, and Joe stared out.

He didn’t have to look at Joe to know what he was feeling, so instead he smiled at Nile and nodded at the door. “You can go first.”

She sat up, setting her musical device aside as if she’d actually been listening to it and not sitting in silence and worrying the way Nicky was.

Joe avoided her eyes as he left the bathroom and she slid in. His cheeks were pink. He realized, of course, that he had thrown a tantrum. But it was an earned tantrum, so he wouldn’t apologize, and Nicky didn’t expect him to.

Nicky patted the bed beside him. “They got a second room,” he said when Joe frowned at the lack of people in the room. “Andy thought it might be better for everyone.”

Joe moved to the bed. He gave Nicky the most frail smile he’d ever seen. “I wasn’t that bad.”

“You asked Allah to curse Copley. That wasn’t exactly fair.”

“Copley didn’t know I asked for that,” Joe argued half-heartedly. He sat down at the side of the bed, and sighed. His shoulders slumped. “I don’t know…”

“Si, amore?”

Joe’s spine was clear through the thin t-shirt. Nicky reached out and touched his back carefully, still not used to his Joe looking so frail.

Joe breathed unsteadily. “I don’t know,” he said again, but this time it was a complete thought. “Of course no one trusts me in a fight right now. I understand that.”

“Joe.”

Joe glanced over his shoulder, and his smile was slightly more genuine. “No one but you,” he amended.

Nicky humphed. There was not a moment in the last thousand years that he had doubted Joe could fight. He would have put his life into Joe’s hands – and had, often – no matter what they were both going through.

“I know why. I know there’s truth to it. I still…” He gestured around the room. “It feels unreal. I worry about closing my eyes and being back in that lab next time they open. But. How can I sit this one out?”

“We know better than to take these battles personally,” Nicky said easily. “Whoever she was working with, they need to be stopped before they destroy all of us. It won’t matter in ten years’ time whether you were involved in that or not. You know that.” He shifted closer to Joe, stroking his back soothingly.

“I know.” Joe trembled under the touch, but not as badly as he had before. “But…I swore to myself that I would kill Kozak for what she did to me, and…”

“And you did,” Nicky answered. “Because I did, and what am I if not an extension of you?”

Joe drew in a breath at that, twisting to take Nicky in. “I want to be myself again.”

“Joe. Yusuf. Hayati.” Nicky took Joe’s hand, sliding their fingers together loosely. “Another fight will not fix you. Time and patience will.”

Joe looked down at their joined hands. “So. Is that it, then? Decision made?”

“No. No decision until we’re more sure who and where these people are. That gives you time to put on some weight and clear your mind. You know I’ll do everything I can do help you.”

“I know.” Joe smiled. “You’re the only thing I have faith in in this world.”

Nicky returned the smile, but it was sad. Joe loved fiercely and well, but when his trust took a blow it was hard for him to recover from that. If he felt that the others in their family were conspiring to keep him from fighting, that was a blow. One he would recover from, and quickly, but as things were Joe needed solid things around him while he recovered from Kozak’s tortures.

Joe took everything so personally. It was one of the things that made him who he was, so Nicky would never want him to change. But it was frustrating when Joe made things harder on himself than they had to be.

He drew in a breath and slid to the side of the bed, sitting up beside Joe. “Well, we have a bed to ourselves tonight, and won’t have Andy and Booker’s snoring keeping us up. So for that I can thank you and your moodiness.”

Joe hugged a laugh. “Then it’s good for something.”

“Don’t lose faith in the people who want most to help you, Joe.” Nicky caught Joe’s face in his hand and leaned in to kiss him lightly.

Joe returned the kiss. “Fine, tell those people to stop being assholes.”

Nicky grinned. “Already done.”

He had talked to Nile in particular, after the others left to get their own room. He had assured her that Joe wouldn’t stay mad – she was vulnerable after his long disappearance, and Joe wasn’t in a place to appreciate that yet – and had warned her that the night might be full of nightmares and worry.

For all Nile was young, though, she was terribly strong. Far more mature than they were about some things. “Yeah, considering I took courses on PTSD and you guys probably don’t know it’s a thing, I’d say I’m ready.”

She came out of the bathroom and peered over at them, mostly Joe. “It’s still okay I’m here?”

Nicky stayed quiet, knowing she wasn’t asking him.

“I’m just shocked you don’t want to spend a night fending off Andy’s demon toenails,” Joe said. “I feel like that might be good training.”

She grinned.


	10. Chapter 10

Nicky first trained to be a sniper while he, Joe, and Booker were in Brazil, going to war with logging companies on behalf of the rubber tappers’ unions in the late 1970s. It was a mostly unsuccessful war, like many they fought, but they all learned things about jungle warfare that served them well afterward.

Nicky liked the idea of being a guardian. Of sitting high and apart from the melee, watching the perimeters of their hideouts, and ending what could have been brutal fighting with a few choice bullets. He was good at it, his aim true and his patience downright meditative.

Joe didn’t start spotting for him until they brought those skills back to missions with Andy. Being a spotter didn’t come as naturally to Joe as sniping came to Nicky: it involved inaction, patience, watchfulness. Joe’s job was to see everything that Nicky was focused too hard to see for himself. He called enemy positions to the rest of their team on the ground. And, most importantly, he watched Nicky’s back so that no matter how close the fighting came to their nest, Nicky could keep his attention through the sights of his long guns.

Joe didn’t have Nicky’s long, slow patience. He would have been a terrible spotter for anyone else. But for Nicky he found patience.

The first time Nicky had looked up after taking three single shots that ended an hours-long battle, he turned around to find a half a dozen dead men behind him, and Joe, bloody and grinning, standing among them waiting for more to come.

It had been a terribly romantic moment, Nicky said later. Joe had killed them so quietly, thoughtful to the end.

Nile hummed thoughtfully. “So Joe’s love language is murder.”

Nicky rolled his eyes and stopped trying to explain, instead happily getting into another argument about the stupidity of ‘love’ ‘languages’ as a concept applied to thousand-year-old lovers.

* * *

Nicky woke fast.

He always had. So many years traveling, camping, living on the road, one keeping watch while the other slept, safety an illusion or a commodity only available to the very wealthy…Nicky slept lightly. (Joe had the opposite response: when he felt he was somewhere safe he slept deep enough to make up for those early, exhausted years.)

That night he woke the moment tension started to creep into Joe’s body.

Joe was on his back, lying flat and straight, and it hurt Nicky to see but he fitted himself there at Joe’s side and said prayers of thanks that he wasn’t alone in bed as he had been for weeks. They slept that way until Joe’s arms began to twitch, and his breathing went uneven.

Nicky made quiet, soothing noises, stroking a hand down Joe’s chest lightly. “I’m here, love, you’re safe,” he murmured in soft Arabic, aware of Nile’s soft, even breathing on the other bed.

Joe relaxed for a moment, but his brow furrowed in the darkness, his arm twitched again.

He woke all at once: his back lifted off the bed and he gasped, hoarse and deep, as if returning to life from a particularly harrowing death. His eyes were open wide, unfocused.

Nicky backed away instantly, knowing better than to reach out and try to touch. “Joe,” he said firmly.

Joe’s wild eyes jerked over, and he gasped again when he saw Nicky. He pushed to sit up fast.

Nicky slid back in, not touching but without space between them. “We’re in an inn north of London,” he said calmly. “We had to leave Copley’s unexpectedly. You remember?”

Joe looked around, his hands clenching in the sheets. He looked down at himself, at his hands. He looked at Nicky.

He let out a breath, wilting. “I might be sick.”

Nicky shrugged. “It’s not our furniture, feel free.”

He did reach to touch then, knowing it was safe. His hand pressed flat to Joe’s back, to the knobs of spine far too pronounced. He felt the shivers sliding though Joe, felt his breaths. It hurt that he was so thin and fragile, that there would be so little between his heart and this dark world.

Joe reached for him, fingers grasping for Nicky’s sleeve. He shut his eyes for a moment. “God damn it.”

Nicky agreed silently. “We knew this was coming.”

“Yeah, but…not until the mission’s over. We’re still in the middle of it. It’s…” _Not fair_ , his eyes said.

Nicky agreed with that, too.

But Joe huffed out a breath, scrubbing at his face. “It’s rude, that’s what it is.”

Nicky smiled faintly, though he wasn’t particularly fond of Joe’s habit for trying to find humor in his own pain, even if that pain was still making his hands shake. “I’ll be sure to lecture your subconscious mind firmly next time we see each other.”

Joe leaned into him, twisting to let his forehead drop to Nicky’s shoulder.

Nicky slid his arms around Joe, pulling him close. He dropped a kiss to Joe’s thick curls, and let himself rest there a moment. “Should we talk through it?”

“No,” Joe answered too fast, a little muffled between them. “It’s nothing surprising.”

“Joe.”

Joe was silent for a moment.

Behind Nicky Nile was breathing less deeply, less evenly. But she wasn’t moving or speaking, leaving them to take care of this between them. He would have to thank her tomorrow.

“I thought…” Joe’s voice was hoarse. “I thought as long as she didn’t get her hands on you, I could get through it fine. I never thought she would actually figure out how to kill me, and there isn’t a pain possible that I haven’t already felt.”

Nicky’s eyes shut, his grip tightened. It was true for both of them, but that didn’t make it any easier to hear.

Joe drew back enough to pinch at the bridge of his nose, digging knuckles in the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t get through it fine,” he finished. “She took so _much_ …”

“Joe…” Nicky swallowed to clear the pain from his voice. “She didn’t take anything, not for good. You are whole, my heart.”

“Yeah.” Joe pulled back further and looked down at his hand. His fingers twitched, and he curled them into a fist and opened them again.

Nicky had no idea what he was seeing. He would know, eventually, but for now he stayed quiet.

“If they hadn’t taken my rings off I would have lost this one,” Joe said, studying the gleam of silver.

And then Nicky knew. God damn her. “She took your hand.”

Joe nodded. “Technically a couple of times.”

Nicky untangled his arms from around Joe to reach out and capture that hand between both of his own. He studied it, despite knowing that it was entirely the same as it had always been. Thinner, the ring still sliding too easily on his finger. But the same whorls at the fingertips, the same old white scars and callouses that Yusuf first died with. From swords, yes, but Nicky’s favorite mark was a smaller, gentler bump of rough skin on the outside of his second finger. From pen and ink, and charcoal. The callous of a poet and artist, not a warrior.

He drew in a deep breath, tracing his fingertip over that callous. “How?”

“She just…sawed it off.”

Nicky bent his head, finger tracing over the inside of his wrist. Such delicate skin, olive veins mostly hidden under rich brown. He adored this hand, and this man, and he couldn’t reconcile feeling that swell of love right alongside the dark desire to somehow kill Kozak again and again.

“Nicky.”

He realized he was crying when he saw the glitter of tears on Joe’s skin. He wasn’t surprised, but knew this wasn’t the time for his tears.

He lifted Joe’s hand and pressed his lips to those veins at his wrist. “I wish she had died slower.”

“Nicky…” Joe’s other hand came up, fingers tracing Nicky’s jaw. “She doesn’t deserve your darkness.”

Nicky nodded. “She earned it all the same.” But he sat back, let go of some tension. He swiped at the wetness drying down his cheeks. “Well. Anyway. She’s gone and we’re here.”

“How did…?”

He smiled with some darkness. “I sliced her throat.”

Joe laughed, but it was choked. “Her favorite way to shut me up, how perfect.”

Nicky’s eyes moved them, from Joe’s beloved hand to the line of his throat. He had seen it, once. Seen how easily she did it, slashing at him with a scalpel. He hadn’t noticed at the time if it was a particularly practiced move, but he had definitely realized that it came as easily to her as drawing breath.

But no, he couldn’t go further down this path tonight. He was meant to be soothing his love, not making things worse.

He smiled into the stroke of Joe’s fingers. “Let’s get some more rest, amore. Perhaps she won’t find us there again tonight.”

“Yeah.” Joe leaned in, his eyes bright and soft through the dim light filtering into the room.

Nicky met him in a kiss, finally releasing his hand so he could slide his hand into Joe’s hair instead. The soft curls through his fingers, Joe’s beard soft against his cheek and chin. The way their mouths fitted together, familiar as the heartbeat in his chest.

To think he had lost this, gone without it for weeks.

To think that he had actually survived that.

* * *

“There was a time,” Andy said wistfully, fond memories making her eyes gleam as she stirred her coffee idly, “when someone would do us wrong and we would hunt them and kill them. So simple, so clean.”

Nile stared at her across the table, looking incredulous.

Around them the small restaurant was filled with chatting diners, covering up their conversation, but Andy wasn’t normally so reckless with her words in public. Mortality was making her less careful somehow.

“The world got very complicated very fast,” Joe agreed, though without the nostalgia factor. He usually liked the new complications of society. Hundreds of years travelling on horseback or on foot, writing letters that might reach their target in weeks or months, or never. Secrecy was easier, but everything else was so damned hard back then.

The world was small, connected. You could get anywhere on the globe in a matter of hours. You could reach anyone through phone or text or tweets.

Without security cameras they wouldn’t have ever found him in that lab. Without Copley’s complicated help, the same kind of complicated that was putting them at risk now, Joe would still be suffering.

Hard to be too mad at that.

“Maybe the ability to go around killing people without consequence was never actually a good thing,” Nile said.

“There were always consequences,” Booker answered. “Even if only internal ones.”

Andy for a moment looked like she wanted to argue that. Joe got it – there were lives he had taken and never thought about again, truly monstrous people – but Nile wouldn’t understand. Booker didn’t understand yet.

Andy stayed quiet, to Joe’s relief. She sipped her coffee, and looked down it with an expression Joe knew from her well, the one that said ‘okay, some things are good enough to justify the insane progress of the last century’. Bless her, a complex and ancient soul appeased by restaurant coffee. British coffee, all the worse.

“You know what I mean,” she said finally. “I know Nicky does. We don’t sit quietly and wait for other people to find our enemies for us. It’s not how we were meant to fight.”

Joe glanced over at Nicky, eyebrows raised.

Nicky kept tight grip of his hand under the table and shrugged. “The search for you was…frustrating,” he said quietly.

Joe could only imagine. God, how much worse would it have been to be outside the lab, not knowing what Nicky might have been suffering. How much sharper that torture.

He squeezed Nicky’s hand. “This isn’t complicated because of the modern world, it’s complicated because no government seems to feel comfortable functioning without a dozen shady agencies operating in the shadows. That's no new thing. Copley will find out which it is, and then we can kill them,” he reassured Andy.

“In the meantime,” Booker said suddenly, pushing his mostly-demolished full English away from him.

(He ate all but the beans, every time. ‘Why beans?’ he griped more often than not. ‘Why do the English insist on adding that one extra thing that keeps their food from being truly good?’ Nicky tended to sympathize. Joe usually ate the beans.)

Joe peered across the table at him.

He looked back, and just like that Joe knew Booker was initiating the conversation Joe would have insisted on if he were more himself.

“I came back here to find Joe, and we found him,” Booker said. His eyes were shadowed, and Joe knew he and Nicky weren’t the only sleep-deprived ones this morning. “I can stay while we deal with these people who know about us. After that…do things go back to how they were?”

“No.”

Joe turned to Nicky, eyebrows high.

Nicky was studying Booker solemnly. “It would be incredibly unfair of us to use you when we need you and then send you into exile when we don’t. I voted for the longest punishment for you,” he said plainly. “But I made the choice to bring you back. We will all have to agree, of course, but…”

Booker’s throat worked.

“Y’all already know how I feel about it,” Nile said, and it was a sign of her time with them that she wasn’t afraid to speak up. She didn’t qualify her remarks just because she barely knew Book. “But I’ll add, for the record, that professional therapy would help every one of us, Booker especially.”

Joe glanced at Andy, but he already knew how she felt as well. Mortality made exile a punishment for her, too, because Booker was family and her time was short.

He looked back at Booker, wondering if the red around his eyes was entirely due to lost sleep. Maybe Booker felt guilty and haunted, maybe he regretted everything. But was that regret due to what had happened, or what hadn’t? If Kozak had found a way to kill Joe after all, would Booker have thought it was worth it in the end?

Why, _why,_ was Booker so eager to die that he had to take all of them with him?

Joe had been there for six weeks, less than two months, and had felt his mind going. It hadn’t recovered, not entirely. He still found himself looking around, unsure why he would dream a diner, a full English, Booker making him feel guilty. He was disconnected from it all, still. Even Nicky, in moments, felt surreal.

His body was bones and skin. He had to know at every moment where Nicky was, real or not. Nicky told him that morning to give himself time, that it was absurd to expect full recover in days. But the process of it was so draining.

He felt Nicky’s hand on his, squeezing suddenly. This time he wasn’t surprised to focus and look around to see all eyes on him, waiting for a response to something Joe hadn’t been listening to. This time, though, it was easy enough to guess.

He looked over at Booker, who seemed to be gazing just over Joe’s head. He pushed his own plate away from him, pushed his chair back. Got to his feet.

Nicky turned to him instantly. Booker’s face lost color.

They came to this cheap little restaurant because it was next door to their hotel, hopefully safe from watching cameras. Joe needed a few minutes of silence, and they would let him go that far.

But he wasn’t cruel, so before he left he nodded at Booker. “I won’t be the reason you leave if the rest of them want you to stay. But I need time.”

He looked over and met Nicky’s eyes for a moment, and Nicky sat back with a faint smile of support. He wouldn’t follow. He would give Joe his few minutes.

At least if no new crises came thundering over the horizon between here and the hotel.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These reviews! I promise I will never write a story with crisis after crisis without end. They bore me too. :) As long as things keep to plan, there will be no more crises here. A few more emotional upheavals, but no more crises. <3
> 
> Uh. Spoilers, I guess.

Yusuf and Nicolò had about three dozen words in common at first. Yusuf learned faster than Nicolò, which he never failed to be smug about, but to his credit Nicolò put in far more hours of study trying to catch up.

He was a stubborn man, this Frank with near-white eyes who was cursed to roam the earth unceasing, like Yusuf himself. Stubborn and proud.

Which was why it came as such a shock when they were passing through a coastal town early in the morning, and despite the unmistakable ring of church bells Nicolò pushed Yusuf to pass by without stopping.

They were both men of faith. Nicolò sat without complaint and played guard when Yusuf did Salah, and prayed often on his own time. He never failed to want to stop at a Christian service when they were near to Christian towns.

So Yusuf dragged him towards the town despite his protests, knowing that at times faith needed encouragement.

Nicolò stopped him, dug his heels in, and when Yusuf didn’t stop nodding towards the town, when he made a clumsy version of the cross sign Nicolò made with his hand. Nicolò stopped and got very red in the face, and started to speak, fast and angry.

The words were far beyond what Yusuf had already learned, fast and thick with emotion. Nicolò sliced his hands through the air, directing harsh words towards the town. At one point he gripped the cross he had worn since the first day that they met and died.

He gripped the cross on its rope, and he pulled so hard the rope snapped. Nicolò flung it back towards the walls of the distant town. He fell to his knees, and he sobbed.

Yusuf understood then.

They didn’t know each other well enough for Yusuf to offer any reassurances. As Nicolò sobbed Yusuf went off and found his cross in the dirt, and put it into one of the sacks that hung from his belt. And then he stood by and watched the horizon, leaving Nicolò to his grief.

Faith needed encouragement, yes. For them, the damned, perhaps it also needed sometimes to be lost and then found again.

He didn't say anything about it, but over the next few days and weeks Yusuf made it a point to note beautiful things. A sunset pinking the sky, the glitter of stars, the shine of a moon so full and heavy that it almost seemed daytime. When Nicolò looked to him, Yusuf made small crosses with his hands, small versions of that Christian gesture, and pointed off to a glittering waterhole or a fruit tree that appeared when hunger started eating at their guts.

He learned the word ‘amen’. He credited God with all, using the Christian name for Him. He thought that Allah would understand and forgive. Faith was everything, no matter which name one called Allah by.

Nicolò slowly worked through whatever wall had grown between he and his God. He started to smile at Yusuf’s clumsy gestures, started pointing things out on his own, making the cross with his own hands. He started to say prayers again, before meals, before bed.

Yusuf secretly fixed the rope of his cross, and when he felt sure Nicolò was ready he pulled it from his pouch and held it out to him. Nicolò clutched it in wonder, tears on his face, murmuring his thanks to Yusuf over and over again.

But he didn’t put it back on. He put it in his own pack, carefully.

Faith changed. Yusuf understood, and said no more about it.

* * *

“I’ve got good news and bad news.”

Andy placed her phone on the small table of the hotel room, speaker on so they could all hear. “Go ahead, James, we’re listening.”

“We’re about ninety-five percent sure that Kozak was working with Homeland.”

Joe sucked in a breath. “Americans.”

“Americans,” Copley confirmed, sounding less than pleased about it. No doubt: that was his own team.

“Is that the good or the bad news?” Booker asked, sitting down heavily on the bed closest to the phone.

“Both. The Americans fund their agencies well, and Homeland is popular with Congress these days. However they got to Kozak, they could have funded a hell of a lot of research without anybody in DC noticing. These guys have a hell of a lot of power.”

“We’re waiting for the good news,” Nile said dryly.

Joe exchanged looks with her, smiling faintly.

She just shrugged. American herself, yes, and military, but Nile was too smart to be blind with her loyalties.

“The good news is I know these guys. I have contacts at the Agency who can get me intel, and I think I know exactly how to put a stop to all of this and get them off your case.”

“That…sounds like good news,” Andy said, her tone implying that she didn’t trust it for that reason.

“Two part plan: we’re going to give them Joe’s corpse, and then I and my former boss at the Agency are going to humiliate the hell out of them for getting involved in some crackpot doctor’s immortality research.”

Nicky’s hand was instantly on Joe’s back, and his voice was tight when he answered. “Maybe you ought to walk us through this whole plan.”

* * *

The first part of Copley’s plan involved getting access to the DHS’s files about Kozak. They needed to know how much she told them and how much proof they had. Only then could the rest of the plan take shape. It would be complex, with layers of diplomacy and obfuscation to cover up whatever Homeland thought they knew. Nicky wasn't looking forward to it.

But before all that, Copley had the name of the ranking Homeland agent in London, and they were going to break in to his home. 

“Easy enough, right? For you lot? We can handle it today.”

Easy, but fast. Things were moving far too fast, and Joe still had shaking hands and too-blank eyes. He was putting weight back on quickly – Andy had been right about that – but Nicky wasn’t looking forward to the setback of fighting about whether he was ready for a mission again.

He never wanted Joe to doubt Nicky’s faith in him. Not for an instant, not even in these extreme circumstances. So he had decided not to argue, whatever Joe wanted to do. To support his love in anything. 

Secretly he did hope that the others could argue enough to make up for the lack, though.

But someone beat him to it. “Can you spare me?”

Andy answered Nile with a frown. “You haven’t had much practice with B and E, and this guy’s probably got some security tricks you should learn to deal with.”

Nile looked at Andy meaningfully, and her eyes shifted to the side. Towards Joe, who seemed to be lost somewhere in his own thoughts and didn’t notice.

Nicky looked between them, frowning.

Andy’s eyes went a fraction wider. “Still," she said too loudly. "This is a quick job, no real time for training, so yeah, I suppose.”

“Good.” Nile turned a smile to Joe. “Hey, focus. Flat twists, that’s what we’re doing today. I look like hell and you owe me.”

Nicky held his breath.

Joe focused. He looked from Nile to Andy, narrow-eyed in a way that said he had been distracted before but not oblivious. But he blew out a breath that was almost a laugh. “You’re not subtle, either of you. Fine, I’ll stay behind this time.”

Nile grinned, trying for innocent but already her tells were becoming obvious to this group. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I take hair care seriously. You’re gonna learn something today.”

And it was done. Plan made. Andy, Booker and Nicky left shortly afterward to rendezvous with Copley. Before they left, Nicky gave Joe a tight hug and promised to be safe.

Then he hugged Nile, hard, whispering his thanks in her ear.

* * *

There was something about the practice of doing hair like Nile’s that suited Joe very well. It was creative, intricate, and he was always up for more ways to be artistic. But it was also…meditative. It could take hours, depending on the style, and could involve thousands of tiny, repetitive movements to get every piece right. His fingers cramped, his mind wandered, but always he came back to what he was doing. Hair, and beauty, and showing his love for his young sister.

They had opted this time for one thick twist like a crown of hair, looping over her head and curling down again, and Joe was pleased to pick up the motions fast. He was more pleased when the routine of it settled into him, making him feel a little more connected to things. 

He didn’t think about where the others were. He didn’t think about his own nightmares, his own apprehension about US secret agents knowing who and what he was, and all the hell that could lead to. While he was focused on Nile’s hair, he didn’t have to think about anything at all.

She sat on the floor between his legs, relaxed, her phone playing familiar music. She had very particular playlists, including one for style days. Joe appreciated her taste: it was easy to fall behind on current trends these days. Nile had modernized them all in ways, in the few months she had been part of the family.

He tugged at the hair in his hand when her head started dipping down too far. “Up, woman.”

She threw her head back way too far, looking backwards up at him with a grin. “Sorry.”

He grinned back. “You have been doing this your whole life, I shouldn’t have more patience than you do.”

“Okay, but my whole life is probably shorter than some naps you’ve taken, so.”

Joe started to laugh, but something in his throat tightened up suddenly.

He could see the line of her throat with her head arched back the way it was, and he remembered.

He had felt her die, in his dreams, the way they all had. The flash of that man’s pesh-kabz while her head was turned, the slice into her throat that felt like nothing for entire seconds before it felt like something. The choking, the blood.

_“Every time you open your mouth, that is what will happen.”_

The choking. God. The gasping so hard for air that wouldn’t come, lungs that wouldn’t fill except with the blood that trickled down where it wasn’t supposed to be. Drowning, he’d thought. Drowning in his own blood.

“Joe. Joe!”

Nile was on her knees suddenly, facing him, and Joe drew back in surprise. He could hear himself gasping, could feel his own hands tight at his throat.

“Joe.” Her voice was sharp, her eyes steady. “You’re alone in this hotel with me. You’re not hurt. You can breathe, I promise. Just breathe.”

He looked down at her neck, confused. She was one who was just dying.

“Joe.” Her hands appeared on his knees, firm. “You feel that? Focus on me, okay? Breathe with me. We’re gonna be fine, just breathe.”

She sucked in a deep breath and let it out loudly. Her eyes never left his. “Come on, with me. In and out.”

They were in a hotel. Nile had died months ago.

Joe’s head was clouded, but he focused on her. She spoke with authority and he listened, used to following orders. He breathed, drawing in one shallow, quick breath and then another.

“Joe. With me.” She was insistent, drawing in another long, deep breath.

He tried. He got a little more air into his lungs, and the next breath a little more, until he could keep up with her and the vice in his chest seemed to loosen.

She nodded, breathing along steadily. “Good. You’re good.”

“Yeah.” He looked around, noting the bolt and chain on the door, the curtain drawn to block out the window. They were safe. They were good.

His hands were shaking when he pried them away from his throat, and he stared down at them. It had been years, decades, since an attack like this. He had forgotten how to deal with it. God, and Nile would be terrified by it, he thought, and they had all tried to expose her to easy things since her violent introduction to this new life.

But when he looked up at her again, she didn’t seem terrified. She seemed far calmer than Joe. She searched his face, and sat back on her heels once she saw whatever it was she was looking for.

“Good, you got some color back in your face.” She patted his knee. “You feel okay?”

He nodded. “I…sorry, yeah. That isn’t supposed to happen.”

She rolled her eyes at him, as if it was no big deal. “A thousand years of war on top of the last few weeks you went through? I think you’ve earned a little PTSD. I used to have panic attacks just hearing shots ring out in the middle of the night, back home.”

“Panic attacks?”

She peered at him, and then made a soft, wounded sound and got to her feet. “Jesus, you people. Of course you never bothered to learn about PTSD. Trauma is way too _modern_ for you cavemen. Get up.” She held her hand out.

He blinked and took it, letting her tug him to his feet.

“Bathroom. Go wash your face, make sure everything’s in order. I know I need a few minutes alone after when it’s me.”

He obeyed, mostly because she looked hurt, and that was the last thing he wanted for her. “Your hair, it will come loose if-”

“Just go.”

He went.

In the bathroom, with the door closed, he found he did feel a little better. He didn’t have to worry about her seeing his hands shake or his breathing get shallower. He obeyed her other order and splashed some cold water over his face and through his hair and beard.

He looked much more himself than he had last time he was faced with staring into a bathroom mirror. Thanks to Nicky, his hair was almost normal, and he was putting weight back on.

But his eyes were stark when he met them in the glass, and he frowned to see it.

He had been through war after war. He had faced down tyrants and murderers, warlords, human traffickers, assassins. Now he was cowering in fear over some doctor? Some weak mortal he could have bested in seconds in a fight? A dead woman? 

It made no sense.

“Joe?”

He had no idea how long he had been standing there before the door cracked open. He only realized his hand was at his throat again when he saw Nile looking at it through the mirror. He jerked it down. “I’m fine.”

She gave him that slightly pursed look that meant she wasn’t falling for his crap. It was the exact same look she gave when he told some elaborate lie about his history, and so he almost smiled to see it.

“They call them trophies in the Corp.”

He looked away from his own reflection. “What?”

“Injuries. Scars. Part of the whole bravado thing, I guess. We’re supposed to see them as trophies. Like anybody wants a giant gash on their throat for the rest of their lives. Like it’s some kinda prize we were lucky to get.”

He humphed a breath, sliding past her as she stepped back from the door. “Soldiers have always tried to find ways to make their suffering feel less…terrifying.”

“You’d know.” Nile rubbed at her own throat. “Confused as I was to wake up when I thought I should be dead, I was glad I didn’t have a scar. Even if it made everyone trust me even less. But sometimes…” She shrugged. “Sometimes I feel robbed, that I went through that and felt that pain and there’s no proof of it anywhere.”

Joe thought about all those hours strapped to that table, watching scars vanish and breaks mend and skin regrow. “We heal,” he said, and he wasn’t sure if he meant it as reassurance or warning. “It’s what we do.”

“Mm.” Nile pushed him towards the bed. “But not as fast as you think you do. Now sit, we are not leaving my hair like this.”


	12. Chapter 12

The first time they had a mattress to themselves after they had grown intimate, with a closed door between them and the world, Yusuf made no secret about what he wanted.

“I had lovers when I was younger. Older men. They taught me well.”

Nicolò had left boys behind in his teenage years, with only limited experience with women afterwards. He had not been taught well. But he had no doubts at all.

He hadn’t been able to keep his hands off Yusuf since their very first kiss, in a sad and lovely cave hundreds of miles away. There was nothing about Yusuf that didn’t attract him: his body, his smiles, his voice. His laughter as he mocked Nicolò for the thousandth time: always delighted, never cruel. His faith, his strength, his vibrant intelligence, the way his eyes would flash in deep offense when anyone so much as gave Nicolò a sideways stare.

His body in the firelight, under their robes and the open sky, bared and beautiful. His face as they touched each other, as Nicolò learned the shape of his cock, learned just how to pleasure him. His eyes, when he reached his peak. Bright and dark and deep as the moonless sky over the desert.

If this had happened close to their first deaths, Nicolò might have repressed his desires. He would have been a fool: there was no one like Yusuf al-Kaysani on this earth. There would have never been a substitute for what he was denying himself.

Luckily he had grown enough since his death not to be that kind of fool.

So when they had their privacy, when they had each had a chance to wash the road off their bodies and shut a door to block the world away, he was ready.

He thought so, anyway.

Yusuf talked him through everything, handed him the small pot of oil he carried for cooking. He showed using his own oiled finger how to open him up for Nicolò's cock, and then he climbed onto the bed on hands and knees, and trusted Nicolò from there.

Opening him had been…spiritual. A blasphemous thought, no doubt, but truth all the same. Joe had sank back, taking him in with gasps and stunted breaths, muttered words that belonged to a part of the Arabic language he had yet to teach Nicolò. It sounded like prayers, though Nicolò knew the words were nothing holy. 

The room they were in was small, drafty, and smelled like the grass stuffing the mattress, but to his dying day Nicolò would swear it was the best place on all the earth he had ever been to. 

He felt every inch of Yusuf taking his cock, so achingly slow not from worry about pain, but fear of his own early release. Yusuf had moaned, arched back, whispered his name. Nicolò couldn’t see his face, and that was the one regret he had about the night afterwards. He could feel him, though, the strength in him, the desire making him shiver, the heat.

There had never been a feeling so perfect.

Of course, as these things usually went, the sacredness of the beginning of their coupling shifted to pure lust, to fast snaps of his hips fucking into Yusuf, to Yusuf choking on his own moans, stroking himself desperately in time with Nicolò's thrusts.

It was the heaven that Nicolò had been denied when he woke up on a field outside Jerusalem.

Afterwards they fell together, panting and sated and ridiculously happy. Joe shifted to face him, to curl up against his body, and they slept hard. Even Nicolò, who never slept deep.

The next morning, as Yusuf cleaned both their sticky bodies and laughed happily about the advantages of quick healing after a good hard fucking, Nicolò found he couldn’t stop smiling.

* * *

“Did that feel anticlimactic to anyone else?”

“You’re complaining?’ Nicky tried to smile over at Booker as Andy took got the car into motion, but there was a flash drive burning a hole in his pocket, and he couldn’t quite find the humor.

It had gone well. That was something to be glad about. The only complicated aspects of this particular mission were things Nicky knew little about: accessing the home’s alarm system, remotely putting the security cameras on the inside and out on a loop. Finding what they needed on the computer inside the home.

“We might have to get in again,” Copley had advised. “Hartley can’t know we were ever here. Copy everything, take nothing.”

Director Daniel Hartley, ranking DHS agent on British soil. Copley had shown them pictures, and Nicky was unimpressed. An old man who had hard eyes and a soft body. One who supported violence but lacked the will to perpetrate it himself.

Nicky, in his long years on this earth, had never wasted an ounce of respect on the kind of leaders who would order their men into places where that leader would never go. Like officers in an army who sent their men to die and watched through binoculars from the next hill over.

Once upon a time leaders were made from soldiers. Now everything was politics.

“He’s sharp, he’s been around a long time. He was NSA before Homeland was formed. But he’s soft from living in an ally country, and we can use that.”

He had also survived cancer twice, which maybe explained why he had given Kozak the time of day. Mortals who had tasted death tended to either search it out again or do everything in their power to feel like it would never find them again.

The drive back to meet Copley was cautious. He had opted to separate himself from them after the first night, because he was being actively looked for. Also because an ex-CIA agent who thought someone was after him needed to make a show of ‘hiding’ in a way meant to draw his stalkers out.

Or something like that. Nicky didn’t understand it at all, this world of Copley’s where no one trusted anything and everyone played games about ten layers deep with each other. It seemed an exhausting way to live.

They reached the hotel – which was much nicer than the inn the rest of them were staying at – and carefully avoided cameras as they went up to his room.

Within five minutes Booker and Copley sat together, looking at whatever Booker had copied onto that drive. Andy paced behind them, restless.

Nicky sat back, knowing better than to get involved. This gap in his knowledge, though…the way he had been helpless after Joe vanished, waiting on other people and their technology to find his husband, that felt like an ax hanging over his head.

He would learn, he promised himself. He might never be as naturally adept as Nile, but he could learn enough. The world was getting more complex, and would likely never get _less_ so _,_ so he had to make it a point not to get left behind.

“There’s video. Damn it.”

Nicky looked up instantly. “Video.”

“Security footage. Hours of it.” Copley exchanged frowns with Booker. “It just means we have our work cut out for us.”

“What kind of work?” Andy moved around behind Copley, staring at the computer. “Why can’t we just erase it?”

“We’re going to corrupt it,” Booker answered.

Nicky just looked at the back of the computer monitor, thinking… _video._

“But in our own way,” Copley went on. “No doubt Hartley has watched at least some of this. Erasing it won’t shut down his interest as long as he thinks it’s real. So…” He shrugged. “We’re going to make it look fake.”

“How?” Andy demanded, annoyed in that way she got, Nicky knew, when the most important details of a mission were too modern for her to be expert on.

“Subtly, in ways he’ll be able to believe he might not have noticed on first watch. We’ll add in some CGI effects that can get spotted under scrutiny, some suspicious cuts, some timestamp issues. It’s not hard, the Agency has some decent programs.”

“The CIA does a lot of footage faking?” Booker asked.

Copley didn’t even look at him. “We’ll have to alter at least a few hours’ worth, and erase the rest. Enough to make them look stupid for ever believing it.” He offered a faint smile. “When we bring them pictures of Joe’s ‘corpse’ that should finish them off. I've already planted the case report with the Met: a John Doe discovered a week ago.”

“A picture from police will satisfy people like these?”

Copley’s faint smile grew. “You’re in my world this time, Andy. Interagency games are common, and nobody from the States in particular is going to insist on pursuing something that sounds as absurd as immortality, not with no physical proof and other nations mocking them.”

Andy met his eyes, and glanced Booker’s way. Finally she nodded. “I still wish we could shoot our way out of this,” she said, surprising no one. “But fine, we’ll give subterfuge a try.”

“Good, because just in case we need a little extra proof, you’re my ace in the hole.” Copley pointed to something on the screen. “Kozak gave them descriptions of all of you. She’s got this shot of you, Andy, as part of your group, so Hartley will assume you’re immortal too.”

Andy hummed. “So I go with you to deal with this guy, and if he doesn’t buy it or points me out…”

“We can give him a live demonstration that immortality and self-healing is bullshit.”

“And what if Hartley wants to prove that by putting a bullet in her skull?” Booker asked fast.

“My world, Book. Not yours. It will all be very civilized, I promise. Three-piece suits and tea, handshakes all around.” Copley smiled wanly. “Just hope that we’re convincing enough that once we’re out of each other’s sights they drop the whole thing. The real reactions happen after the meetings are over.”

“Well.” Booker heaved a sigh. “There’s a hell of a lot to do before then.” He started to do something with the computer.

Andy lay a hand on his arm to stop him suddenly, and looked over at Nicky. “You should get back to the hotel, check on Joe. Book, give him a lift and get your ass back here.”

Getting rid of him. It wasn’t hard to guess why.

Video.

Nicky pushed to his feet, not bothering to dignify her with a response. “I want to see.”

“But you’re smart enough to know why that’s a bad idea,” she answered instantly.

He was, it was true. But there were no good ideas to choose instead. Nicky had to help Joe. To do that, he had to know.

“He barely sleeps,” he said, speaking only to Andy despite the two men listening. “He stares into space. He shakes. He needs help, and yes, he has all of us, but…”

He didn’t have to go on. Andy knew Nicky and Joe and how they operated. Andy and Booker always chose to nurse their worst wounds in private. Joe and Nicky had each other. Nicky had always known that it was unfair for poor Andy and Booker, but it was their choice not to confide much in the rest of their group.

It also doubled Joe and Nicky’s pain. One of them wounded hurt both of them, and always had. Yes, they had it easier than the others. But they had it so much harder.

Andy’s mouth pressed thin, but she nodded him over. “We’ll watch long enough to see what we’re dealing with. That’s it.”

Nicky moved to her side, behind Booker and Copley.

The camera was aimed at the lab itself, so Joe was a slight figure near the far side of the screen.

Copley worked the controls, fast-forwarding until there was movement. Kozak. Nicky wanted to hiss at the sight of her like a cornered alleycat.

They watched her slit Joe’s throat, collectively wincing at the quick callousness of it. After fast-forwarding, they watched her do it again. And again, and again. In between, when he was unconscious, she left him alone, taking one small blood sample from his neck and studying it. Sometimes they exchanged words, sometimes not.

Nicky watched Joe wake again and again, and every time Joe looked around wildly, searching. Nicky knew Joe was looking for him, because Nicky would have done the same. It made his hands clench, that wild look followed by the slump of Joe realizing that he was alone.

They watched her experiment. She drew blood and shoved six inch needles into him for bone marrow. She cut deep into his thigh, pinning skin back to watch muscle at work, the straps too tight to make Joe’s thrashing a nuisance to her.

Copley paused the footage entirely when she brought out the electric saw and placed it at his wrist.

Nicky shook his head. “Play it.”

Joe had his eyes closed, his mouth safely gagged by then. He was gray-faced, terrified. But Nicky knew about the hand already. There was no point stopping it there.

“Nicky.” Andy sounded unusually faint.

“Play it,” he insisted.

Copley played it. Nicky watched Joe struggle, watched him scream into his gag, watched his head lol and his body seize. He watched Kozak pull his hand away from his body finally, smiling in satisfaction.

Nicky watched Joe fight, watched him use his missing hand to free his arm to strike her. Useless. One of the guards shot him, and he wasn’t any more free. But Nicky was proud, darkly proud.

Until Copley fast forwarded a bit more, and Joe opened his eyes to an even bigger bone saw, set at his shoulder.

“Jesus Christ.” Booker pushed back from the desk and got up, stumbling away from them.

Nicky’s eyes stayed on the screen. He didn’t breathe until Joe passed out.

Copley stopped the footage again. “Enough?” he asked, his voice hushed.

Nicky looked up and over, but at Andy. “This is only the first day.”

Andy’s eyes were still on the screen, too bright with moisture. “How many hours of footage are there?”

Copley sighed, shutting the screen entirely. “Looks like four files total. A hundred hours each, give or take.”

Four hundred hours.

Nicky nodded slowly. He stepped back. His hands were fisted so tightly he was drawing blood.

“I would like to go back now,” he said quietly.

* * *

“Booker and Nicky are on their way back for a stop. I guess whatever they’re doing is gonna take a while.”

Joe looked up from his sketch pad, scowling at Nile. “Put that phone down. You’ll ruin my vision.”

“Aww, your vision.” Nile peered closer at her phone suddenly. “Oh. Book says…” She blinked and glanced Joe’s way. “I’m gonna head back with him. They must need me for something.”

Joe rolled his eyes and started sketching the phone into the picture out of spite. “Lift your chin.”

She gave the phone screen another look, but set it aside and lifted her chin. “Is this something I’m gonna have to get used to?”

“Once I learn your face well enough I can improvise,” Joe answered. “I just don’t want to learn it wrong. The first few are important.”

“And sitting here in this cramped ass hotel room is worth immortalizing, you think?”

Joe laughed. Everyone complained so much at the start, at least until they saw his work and their pride got involved. “You’re not in a hotel room in this sketch.” Though now that the phone was in her hand he was thinking of other modern touches to add on. “I’m turning you into a tribute to Anuket.”

She looked over, eyebrow raised. “The Nile goddess? Subtle.”

He grinned. “I’m a simple soul.”

She smiled after a moment and settled back into position.

“You know,” he said as he went back to work. “I've been meaning to tell you. As terrifying as it was for you to become one of us…it was unnerving for us, too.”

She glanced at him again just like that, her smile shrinking. “Yeah?”

“You see how we are. We’re a family. There are so few of us that any change is…disruptive.” He frowned, peering at her for a moment before looking back at his sheet. “You have a remarkable jawline.”

“Shut up.”

He chuckled. “I mean it. Soft and strong all at once. Really, your features are incredibly well proportioned. A perfect face.”

“Stop flirting, your husband’s on his way back.”

“Mashallah, you were wasted in a military uniform.”

“Joe!” But she was laughing by then. “What’s my jawline got to do with me disrupting your family?”

“Well, that’s the thing. You haven’t. Our dynamic has changed, of course, but it’s felt very easy.” He shrugged. “I thought at first, ‘if someone _had_ to be added to us, I’m glad it was her.’ And now I just think ‘I’m glad she‘s come.’”

She looked over, her eyes going soft. “Well. Shit.”

Joe laughed, but looked from her to the half-finished drawing, trying to see what he needed to change to bring that softness into her sketch.

She looked away again, chin high, smiling.

The door burst open a few minutes later, shattering the peace that had fallen.

Booker moved in fast. “Nile. We gotta go.”

She was up and moving in a flash, going for her jacket without missing a beat. “Is something happening? Were you guys spotted?”

Joe lay his sketchbook aside and stood uncertainly.

“Nope, we just have to go. Come on.”

“Joe—“

“He’s fine here.”

Booker couldn’t even look his way, Joe noticed.

He hated that that sent a wash of paranoia down him. He hated that he had to think, _did he do something else? Did he send them after us again?_ He hated that it was believable to him, after everything, that Booker might come to protect Nile but leave Joe in the wind.

He didn’t truly believe it, but he had the thoughts all the same.

The door opened again while Booker was still bustling Nile out, and Nicky came in.

Everything tunneled.

All Joe could see was the tension in Nicky’s body, the way his jaw was set like he was barely holding himself together. His eyes, anguished, when he spotted Joe there and moved in to him haltingly.

Joe heard the door close as Booker and Nile left, but he had eyes only for Nicky. This was bad, this was Nicky after the worst missions, after personal failures, the deaths of innocents, the loss of a war.

Joe met him halfway, reaching out for him.

“What happened?” he asked in soft Genoese, seeing entire nightmares in those beloved pale blue eyes.

Nicky shook his head silently. He reached out in turn, but only brushed fingertips across Joe’s throat. He made a soft sound like he was in pain, his eyes huge and shadowed.

“Nicky.” Joe searched his face, tension squeezing at his voice. “Tell me. Please.” He lifted his hand to touch Nicky’s face, to reassure.

But Nicky caught his wrist and looked down at his hand, and seemed all the more injured. “I’m sorry,” he rasped out, staring at Joe’s hand. “I…”

Joe frowned. He tugged at Nicky’s hand. “Come on, amore, sit down and tell me.”

Nicky went with him to the bed, but stopped there. He lifted Joe’s hand, pressing his mouth to the line of his wrist. “There was…video. Footage. So many hours of…”

Footage. 

“Oh.” Joe swallowed, now understanding why Nicky was paying his hand so much attention again. He remembered the red lights of security cameras, staring down at him in the dark night after night once he was alone.

He sat on the bed, feeling suddenly exhausted.

Nicky dropped to his knees on the floor right in front of Joe, sliding between his legs and wrapping his arms around him fiercely. He buried his face against Joe’s stomach, his breathing ragged.

“Oh, Nicolò.” Joe’s throat worked. He slid his fingers through Nicky’s hair. “Why would you watch?”

“I had to,” Nicky said into his shirt. “You were alone. You were _alone_.”

It was better that way, Joe wanted to say. He wanted to mean it. Nothing that woman had done to him could have been worse than anything she might have done to Nicky.

Still. Alone. Alone had been hard. Waking alone and dying alone, hurting alone, spending so many hours every night alone, dreaming up talks he might have with Nicky. Nicky, who was safe, with their family, but still alone himself.

He stroked Nicky’s hair, feeling him shudder. If their positions had been reversed, and Nicky had gone through pain for so many weeks without him…Joe wouldn’t have survived that. Nicky, with his huge heart, had to be suffering.

“No more,” Joe murmured. “Don’t punish yourself over me, Nicky. It would break my heart.”

Nicky made a soft sound, his fingers clenching in the back of Joe’s shirt. A moment later he drew back, looking up at Joe with the weight of all his years darkening his eyes.

“What breaks my heart,” he said, voice raw, “is that this world is lucky enough to have you in it, but chooses to abuse you. That someone could look at you – _you,_ Joe - and want to hurt you. I will never understand.”

Joe smiled faintly. “I guess Kozak didn’t like me quite as much as you do.”

Nicky scowled, ducking his head down again fast as if to hide it from Joe. “If it were two centuries ago I would spit to hear her name said. I have never hated anyone so much.”

Joe huffed, but allowed it. It still felt strange to him that, of all the evil they had gone up against, the worst was this one small woman who talked about healing people and saving humanity. He had believed her at first, when she worked for Merrick. He would never know if she had changed afterwards or if she was always full of shit.

He stroked through Nicky’s hair again. “You killed her. She won’t bother us again.”

Nicky gave a soft, sharp laugh that sounded far more like Booker than Nicky. “I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had listened to Andy and brought her with us, so I could do it slowly. So I could do something with this…these _feelings_.”

“No. No, don’t wish that.” Joe might have gotten some relief out of that too, actually. Being able to watch for himself instead of just hearing about her death later. But that kind of thing left stains, and he didn’t want her to stain them any more than she already had.

He sighed. Nicky was too good to ever see his words through, if they had been possible, so he didn’t bother objecting any further. Sometimes, in the bad times, a little violent thought could be a relief.

He let Nicky’s poor disheveled hair go reluctantly. “Come on, Nicky, I’ll get you some water, we can—“

“No.” Nicky drew in a breath and let it out, leaning his head back against Joe’s stomach. “I don’t think I can let you go yet.”

Joe hated to hear the pain in his voice, but something made him smile all the same.

“Okay. It’s okay, hayati.” He let his fingers thread back through Nicky’s hair, thinking it a miracle that his heart hadn’t burst a thousand times over through the years, out of the sheer volume of love he felt for this man. “As long as you want.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this overdue? It feels overdue. It is also desperately unbetaed. 
> 
> Herein is some angst, some reconciliation, and some smut.

They kept souvenirs from past lives, past versions of themselves. Andy warned them against it, but considering every other safe house they used on missions was filled with ancient weaponry and 3000 year old coins and faded love letters written on papyrus, they didn’t take her all that seriously.

Besides, it wasn’t something they did all the time. Just when times were particularly memorable, or long-lasting. 

They had old IDs from schools and jobs (some, Joe had noticed, Copley had on his Wall of Incrimination). A piece of grubby fabric from the uniform Nicky had worn to go undercover in a traveling circus in western China: not an official job, but Nicky heard rumors about animal abuse and, well, was Nicky about it. 

Joe had a pamphlet of poems his students had made for him after he spent three years teaching in Lebanon. He had a copy of a book of translations of ‘ancient’ Arabic poetry nearly lost to history (except he’d kept copies of scrolls in one of their earliest safehouses and donated them to a university in Munich in the 60s, along with some hand-written translations).

Nicky had sketches done of him from Michelangelo, from da Vinci, from Carravagio in his less emo times. Joe hadn’t been kidding when he told Nile that Nicky had a sadness in him that drew painters to him like moths to lamps. Nicky hung in too many museums to count. 

Joe had the dubious distinction of playing Jesus in a few paintings himself, at least until the style shifted to making Jesus the most Swedish looking Middle Eastern man Joe had ever seen.

His personal favorite souvenir was the least flashy thing in their collection: a hand-carved wooden staff from a three year period in the thirteenth century when he and Nicky had tended to sheep in northern Spain. A peaceful, happy time, bookmarked on either side by blood and war. 

Nicky’s favorite was a painting, but not one of him. One that Joe had painted, commissioned by a lord in the court of Louis XIV. That painting had led to Joe being executed when the lord found it a little too true-to-life to appease his ego. (Joe knew that would happen, but the man was an absolute asshole, and the nasty beheading was worth it. Nicky found the story hilarious after a few decades’ distance from said beheading, enough to find the painting and secret it away at one of their homes.)

“Keepsakes are important,” Joe had explained to Booker early in his immortality. He said the same to Nile, but she was of a time when everything felt both transitory and permanent all at once. She told him that the internet lasted forever. 

He told her to print things out if they were special, to laminate or frame or do whatever she had to do to make them last. Because if they knew one thing after so many centuries, it was that  _ nothing  _ lasted forever.

* * *

Sleeping in Nicky’s arms the night before, once they were both settled in and clear of worry enough to sleep, Joe had remembered his unkind thoughts towards Booker and felt guilty for them. Book had been abrupt with him for Joe’s own sake, or at least for Nicky’s. He was trying to give them privacy, and Joe had thought of him only as a possible traitor. 

But sitting at breakfast the next morning, in the same restaurant beside the hotel, Joe realized that he was only half right. 

He had gotten suspicious the day before because Booker hadn’t even been able to look at him. This morning,  _ nobody  _ was looking at him. No one but Nicky.

Joe didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like it was a mystery. Video, Nicky said. They had to do something to corrupt hours of video. They had probably spent most of the night watching him screaming on a table. 

The thought robbed him of his appetite. 

Even Nile. She was quiet, looking at the world with slumped shoulders and sad eyes like she had never before realized how cruel people could be. How could they have shown it to Nile?

He ignored the stilted conversation around him, ignored the looks they were constantly trading each other, as if he couldn’t see. His irritation grew as he toyed with his food, self-conscious of each move he made and what they might make of it. The food was sandpaper in his throat; Andy was right that he was putting on weight faster than he’d expected, but something about the act of eating still felt strange to him.

Nobody could look at him, but he felt like he was in a spotlight. 

If he were feeling more generous, he might put on a brave face. Smile, give them exactly the hurting-but-persevering attitude that they would be most likely to buy and glad to see. But he wasn’t feeling generous.

“Another tea for--” 

Joe startled so badly when the voice sounded over his head that his chair scraped on the floor. 

Their server, the greying, pleasingly fat woman who had been there the day before as well, jumped back, equally startled. “Sorry! Sorry, I just--”

Joe felt their eyes, felt their gazes jerk around in case there was a threat and then settle so heavily on Joe that it felt smothering. It turned his face red, sent his eyes plunging downward with an unfamiliar sense of shame. 

He could see Nicky reaching out for him out of the corner of his eyes, no doubt to be sober and reassuring. 

Joe pushed back from the table, from that stifling pity, and left the small restaurant as fast as he could walk. 

* * *

Nicky was usually good at reading Joe. He was good at sensing when he needed space, when he needed comfort. They knew each other too well to have to verbalize every desire. 

But the Joe that all but ran out of the restaurant, washed out and wide eyed, was unfamiliar. Not brand new, but not well known. 

Nicky waited only a minute before he excused himself from the table. Just long enough to reassure the woman taking care of them, and to make sure the others wouldn’t follow yet. 

He walked the short distance back to their room wearily, his feet dragging as he went. He was tired, he had to admit it. The last two months had been endless, and these days since leaving Copley’s and fleeing invisible enemies had been...a lot to deal with. Joe was far more coherent, that was the only good part of being chased. If they had stayed at Copley’s, recovering in safety, it might have taken him a lot longer to get to this point.

But maybe that was a bad thing. Andy had warned him: they healed too fast. 

Joe said Nile had been talking to him about panic attacks and PTSD, concepts they were familiar with under different names, in different forms. Nothing they had paid much attention to, though, shamefully. 

They had long ago simply resigned themselves to nightmares, to taking months or years between the harder missions to recover to the point where the sight of guns didn’t make them freeze, or the sight of the sea, or the sight of fire, or blood, or death. Whatever had gotten to them most during any given disaster. 

Their bodies healed, so they trusted that their minds healed, too. They had to. None of them had any choice in the matter.

Nile was introducing them to new ideas, though. Times had changed, and knowledge about mental scars had progressed. Even the military that Nile had left behind trained her on invisible wounds, and now she was teaching them, bit by bit. 

He reached their room without laying eyes on Joe, and unlocked the door hoping that Joe hadn’t opted to run off somewhere else. 

“What?” Joe barked out from the dim inside of the room, immediately soothing that fear. 

Nicky frowned and moved in. “What is ‘what’? I’m worried about you.” 

“No shit.” Joe was sitting by the window, curtain drawn, body tense. He wasn’t even looking at Nicky, just glaring with angry eyes out into the dim room. 

Nicky approached slowly, hating the uncertainty of it. “Joe, are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” 

Nicky moved around the small table laden with their things. The room was a mess after these three days, but no worse than any safe house they stayed in between missions. 

He sat. “Really. How are you?”

“Really, I’m  _ fine.  _ Look at me, not a scratch, not a bruise.”

“Joe.” 

“ _ What _ ?”

Nicky frowned at that. He had done nothing to earn that snap. “Joe, look at me.” 

Joe’s throat worked. “I can’t.” 

“What? Why not?” 

“Because I’m broken in your eyes. All of you. All you see is the damage.”

Oh. 

Nicky swallowed. “Oh. Joe.” 

“I’m healed. I’m fine. But now that I know this isn’t a dream, I feel like that lab  _ was _ . It isn’t real, it’s gone. I just...feel it. And now you know, and you see it when you look at me, and I can’t take any more of this.” 

Nicky’s heart clenched, and a chill shivered down him. “You can. Joe, it’s been days since we got you back, it’s still so soon. We’ll go somewhere to recover, once we’re safe. Malta, as I teased you before. We’ll take months, as long as you need.”

“Once we’re safe.” Joe looked down at his lap. His hands were clenched at his thighs, holding so much tension he was almost shaking. “We’ve been at war for a thousand years, Nicky. When have we ever been safe? When will we ever be?”

“Joe, please.”

“It’s too much. It’s not fair. Why do we have to fight endlessly to earn this immortality? Why is everything blood and violence and pain?” His bleak eyes looked everywhere but Nicky. “What if I can’t do it anymore?” 

Worry was a dagger at Nicky’s throat, making his voice sharp. “Don’t talk like that.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because. Andy lost her faith then became mortal.” 

Nicky hadn’t realized he was going to say those words until he did. He hadn’t even consciously realized that he had that fear, not until he heard the words coming from Joe’s mouth. 

If Joe was surprised, he didn’t show it. “Fine. Let it happen. If a thousand more years means going through everything we’ve gone through again, is it worth it?” 

Nicky couldn’t breathe. Joe wasn’t looking at him, so he couldn’t see what was going on in his eyes, but his voice was pure anger. Exhaustion, maybe, but mostly anger. 

He spoke quietly. “Have the good times not been enough?”

“That’s a cheat of an answer.”

Nicky swallowed. “So. You would just...go? Without me?”

That did bring Joe’s eyes up, instant and sharp. “Jesus, what a selfish fucking thing to say.” 

Nicky winced, knowing it was true, but it was a noble selfishness. The same selfishness that made him fight so hard when anything happened to Joe. The feeling that wanted to spend eternity with the man he loved. 

But Joe never called him out on that. Nicky didn’t call it out when it was Joe’s turn. He didn’t know how to respond. He would have reminded Joe of every time they had exchanged vows to go out together if it was at all in their power, but that, too, was selfish. 

“I need…” Joe’s expression crumpled a little with whatever it was he read in Nicky’s face. He wilted, but he pointed at the door. “Just go.” 

“Go?” 

“Go! Jesus, Nicky, give me some space! I’m suffocating. I’ll say worse, and I don’t want to say worse to you. Just leave me alone.” 

Nicky opened his mouth, then closed it. 

He went to the door, opened it slowly. He took his time, just in case. 

The silence behind him was stifling. 

He left. 

* * *

Well, if Kozak couldn’t kill him, maybe guilt would.

* * *

A knock on the door made Joe stir after he didn’t know how long sitting in silence, though it was more out of anger than anything else. 

It wouldn’t be Nicky again. He knew that well. Someone else coming for round two, in Nicky’s defense. 

Joe loved his family. He was incredibly lucky to have brilliant, strong, caring people to share his slice of eternity with. But for the love of god, he needed some time.

He pulled the door open, scowling. His expression shifted, though, when he saw who it was.

Booker smiled weakly. “I just need a couple of minutes.”

Joe pulled the door open to let him in. This was dangerous. If he could rage at Nicky of all people, Booker was especially unsafe. 

Joe shut the door and leaned back against it, unwilling to commit to this too deeply. 

Booker had no such discomfort. He went to the bed and dropped to sit at the corner of the mattress with a sigh. 

He looked tired. Joe wasn’t surprised by that: though part of it was due to everyone scrambling to find Joe, and now scrambling to stay ahead of their enemies, some of it was a ramped-up version of the melancholy Booker always seemed to carry around with him. 

It was hard to even look at him. 

Booker scrubbed at the back of his neck, shoulders slumped, elbows on his knees and hands falling to dangle between his legs. 

After a minute, he huffed a breath and looked up at Joe. “I used to think that endless life without the people I loved was hell. Some kind of purgatory, at least.”

Joe regarded him. He knew that feeling: they all did. Even Nicky, even Joe. Eternity was grueling no matter what. He didn’t say that, though. It would turn into an argument, and he was a little curious about what point Booker was building up to.

He went on slowly. “I lost sight of the fact that there were new people in my life who loved me, and let me love them.” He blew out a loud, harsh breath. “No. I didn’t lose sight of it; it didn’t matter to me. I prioritized ghosts. And yesterday I spent twelve hours watching evidence of exactly what that brought me to.”

Joe grimaced. Those fucking videos. He wished Copley had never found them. He didn’t want this pain for his family, not even Booker. 

“Joe.” Booker hesitated, and seemed to rethink what he was going to say. “When this is done, and we’re out of danger, I’m leaving again. Going back to Paris, like I should.”

Joe sucked in a breath. 

Booker studied his face. “I appreciate your agreeing that if the others wanted me back, you wouldn’t fight it. But it’s not fair to you to have to make that choice, not after what you went through. It wasn’t fair to put that on you, and it can’t be helping your mood.”

“Book…” 

“Look, it’s not  _ just  _ because of what happened to you.” Booker managed a half smile. “That wouldn’t be fair to you either.”

“No? Then what is it?”

Book sighed. “You realize that talking about this is like eating glass, right?”

Joe stared at him. “You came to me.”

“Right. Well.” He scratched at his neck again, one of his favorite nervous gestures. “In the month before they called me to come back, I realized that solitude has always terrified me. Being told that I couldn’t come back to you when I needed to made it so much worse. It was...gaping, this empty hole where you all should have been. It was…” He sighed. “There’s nothing in English or French for that feeling. The Germans are morbid, maybe they have a word.”

Joe left the door behind, moving to sit at the small table by the window where he had been so cruel to Nicky. “This doesn’t explain why you’d leave.” 

“Yeah, it does. Loneliness  _ terrifies  _ me, Joe. So much that I sold out the only people who understood me, just wanting to end that feeling. That means I have to figure out how to deal with it. I have to beat that feeling, or I’ll never be safe for you guys.” Booker smiled sadly. “So, I guess I’m going to self-exile for a while. Not all the way, and probably not for a hundred years. I’m not that strong, and with Andy…”

Joe nodded. He looked out at Booker, and all the anger he’d held on to since that morning seemed to wither in his chest. To lose heat and shape and become a shadow cast over his heart. 

He cleared his throat. “This isn’t what I want.” 

Booker shrugged. “Do you know what you do want?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Thought so.”

This time Joe returned that small, sad smile. “Booker.” 

“I’ll talk to the others. They’ll understand. I’ll make sure they know it’s my own choice. Not that they’ll blame you. For anything, ever again. Really, you could get away with murder right now.” 

Joe laughed, hoarse. He scrubbed at his face. “I don’t know what I want, but I don’t want this. You’re my brother.”

Booker’s smile vanished. He pushed to his feet. “I’ll never be sorry enough for what you went through. Let me do this. You deserve a better brother, and I’m willing to work to become that.” 

Joe met him halfway, and Booker crushed him into his embrace, tight enough to feel desperate. 

“I’m so sorry,” he said again, into Joe’s shoulder. 

Joe shook his head, squeezing him right back, just as tight. “There’s been enough suffering, Book. Don’t punish yourself. Come back to us.” 

“I will.” Booker drew back, not trying to hide the tear tracks down his face. “Anyway, let’s focus on getting these fuckers for now. Everything else can wait.” 

* * *

Nicky was never scared to come home to his husband. They fought, they always had. Anyone would, it was a very human thing. Joe got heated, Nicky got terse, and they got over it. Sometimes in hours, sometimes in weeks or months. 

He could face Joe’s anger. He welcomed it: Nile said that it was a form of progress. What he was nervous about was somehow making it worse. 

It was such a rare thing in their lives, to have gone through something so major separately. They had split at times during the world wars, but the trauma of war was universal enough that they understood each other’s baggage from it afterwards. 

This was different. This was beyond Nicky, and he had no idea how to keep from making it worse. He could handle anything, except the thought that his presence was harming Joe in any way.

He knocked before he put the key card in to unlock the door. He peered in, wanting to gauge the mood. “Joe? It’s me.” 

The door to the bathroom opened as Nicky moved in. Joe stepped out, and he smiled at Nicky. Just a smile, small and rueful. But real. “Hey.”

Nicky let out a breath, instantly relieved. Joe walked lighter, and the thunder was out of his face. Whatever had caused the change, Nicky was thrilled to see it. 

He would never have asked: talking about a thing could lessen it. But Joe must have seen something in his face, because he answered anyway.

“Booker. We talked.” 

Nicky smiled. “Definitely overdue.” 

“Yeah.” Joe’s expression shifted. He searched Nicky’s face.

Nicky spoke up fast. “We owe each other no apologies, so let’s don’t waste time. All I want is for you to be better.” 

Joe approached him, walking right into Nicky’s arms and pressing his forehead to Nicky’s. He shut his eyes. 

Nicky savored it. The points of warmth where Joe pressed against him, the puff of his breath, that touch of their heads together, such an eloquent shorthand after all these centuries together.

Joe spoke softly. “I won’t thank you for being here for me, because I know what you’ll say. But...you know that I would never willingly go anywhere without you. I’m lost without you. I’m nothing. A void.” 

Once upon a time, Nicky would have fought back against that. He would have gently admonished Joe, reminding him that he was, in plain terms, the single greatest man Nicky would ever know. 

But that was before Joe had vanished for nearly two months. Two months out of ten thousand months lived together, yet Nicky had been exactly what Joe described. A void. He had existed, but not lived. It was a daunting feeling. He had no control over it. Joe was just his other half, and a half a man could not flourish. It was the reason why Joe expressing a wish to become mortal, even alone, had hurt so deep.

But Joe knew that, Nicky already knew. So he wouldn’t argue now. He would accept the truth as it was: that they had to have each other, and the loss of either would destroy both. It was silly to think any protests would change that. 

He slid his hands up Joe’s shirt, letting them join over his heart. “I love you. Always.” He spoke lowly, hoarse with knowing the full weight of what that feeling meant. 

Joe nodded, slight enough that they didn’t lose contact for a moment. “I love you.”

Nicky kissed him so gently it felt like a sigh.

Joe chased him to kiss him again, soft and slow. He brought his fingers up to trace against Nicky’s jaw. “I hurt you today.”

“For a little while. Then I remembered that I know you better than that.” Nicky smiled against his fingers. He leaned in, suddenly unwilling to not be close to his love. “I feel like I’ve had no time with you. I haven’t been able to tell you how I missed you. Just breathing the same air like this.”

Joe made a soft sound and kissed him again, less steady. “I’m sorry I didn’t come back to you right away,” he murmured against Nicky’s mouth, before kissing again to keep from hearing Nicky’s objection to that kind of apology. 

Nicky contented himself with reaching up, sliding his fingers into Joe’s soft curls as he lost himself in the taste of his husband’s mouth. 

God, it felt like taking a solid breath for the first time after weeks being strangled. It felt like a shifting inside, as if his organs had been displaced and had just split silently back into place. Joe felt thin against him, yes, but not as thin as he had been, and what did it matter? Their bodies still slotted together perfectly. Joe was whole, alive, back in Nicky’s arms. 

Joe’s hands found Nicky’s hips, pulling their bodies tight to each other.

Nicky’s body never had much choice in how it responded to Joe’s closeness. Hours ago they were arguing, Joe was distraught, Nicky was terrified. Now nothing mattered but the two of them, this closeness after so long apart. 

Maybe this was what Joe needed to feel more than broken in Nicky’s eyes. Maybe this was what Nicky needed to reassure himself that Joe was his again. He felt himself thickening in his jeans, pressed into Joe’s thigh, and felt nothing but relieved that this hadn't been lost. 

Joe groaned against his mouth, leg flexing to grind into Nicky’s stirring cock. “Nicky. Nicolò. I need...”

Nicky drew back enough to meet his eyes, to read there exactly what it was that Joe needed. He swallowed at what he found, thrilled. They were back in sync, and that was a heady feeling. 

“Let me…”

Joe nodded, trusting him entirely. He kissed Nicky again, light and slow, then pulled away. There was no urgency here, now that they were on the same page.

Joe turned and went to the small bathroom. 

Nicky went to their bed and found his phone. He texted Nile, asking if they might please have the room all night. She was still with Andy and Booker, so they would all hear about the request. They would be pleased, Nicky thought.

He was rather pleased himself. It had been far too long, and it spoke about Joe’s recovery in a way that was better than Nicky had dared to hope for.

Nile texted back the tiny picture of the raised thumb. Nicky smiled and put his phone away, and looked around the room carefully. The beds were both unmade from their days-long stay and refusal to allow housekeeping, so he went to the bed he and Joe shared and made it up neatly, arranging sheet and blanket and pillows and then turning the edge of the blankets down to make it look inviting.

It was unnecessary, he knew. They wouldn’t even see it once they were lost in each other. But it made him feel better. Romance was not a necessity, and never had been, but they were both romantic men. 

He turned off the overhead light and turned on the bedside lamp, and made sure the curtains were drawn tight over the window and the door was locked and bolted.

Then he turned to the closed bathroom door, and a fist clenched inside his chest. 

He remembered Copley’s house, Joe’s silent, dead-eyed stare at the stranger he found in the bathroom mirror. Had it been too long? Was Joe gone again?

Nicky took a step towards the door, but heard Joe in his head, so furious about being seen as broken after what he had gone through. Nicky hated the idea of ruining their night by making him feel that way again. But he hated more the idea of leaving Joe on his own if he was suffering. 

He approached the door and knocked lightly. “All is well?” he asked in quiet Italian.

Joe emerged a moment later, his cheeks flushed but otherwise looking just as he had. “All is well,” he answered in kind. He stepped right into Nicky’s arms. “Your turn. And hurry. I want you inside me.” 

Nicky groaned softly, his cock all but twitching in his jeans. He kissed Joe, deep and lewd, in answer, leaving them both breathless as he went to the bathroom to freshen up. 

When he came out again, Joe was naked and sitting on the edge of their bed, legs spread, stroking his cock slowly. 

Nicky damn near tripped over his own feet, vision tunneling until his love’s opened mouth and glimmering eyes, his lean body, his leaking cock, were all he saw. Desire hot enough to hurt hot through him, sending him stumbling to the bed and dropping to his knees at Joe’s feet. 

Joe reached for him, sliding his free hand through Nicky’s hair. “Amore mio.” 

Nicky’s throat was dry, his hands shaking as he slid them up Joe’s thighs. “Hayati.” He dipped his head, pressing open-mouthed kisses up Joe’s leg, savoring the smell, the taste of his husband’s skin. 

God, he had  _ missed  _ this. 

Joe breathed deep and even over his head. He released his cock, and it jutted up between them in a way that caught Nicky’s entire focus. Mouth-watering. But even as Nicky leaned in, Joe grabbed his shirt and tugged at it. 

“Off. Let me see you.” 

Nicky growled, but sat back on his heels to jerk his shirt over his head and toss it to the side. But he gave Joe no time to look, instantly diving back between his legs and wrapping his lips around the thick head of his cock. 

Joe groaned, low. “God, Nicky.”

Nicky shut his eyes, focused and intent. This taste, Joe’s voice cracking. This thick warmth against his tongue. Magic. He wrapped his fist tight around the base of him, lathing at him with a quick, hungry tongue.

“Nicky. Baby. It’s been a while and I want to come with you inside me.” Joe was breathless, lust thickening his voice in that way Nicky loved being the cause of. 

Nicky pulled off of him long enough to glance upwards. “You’ll come then, too, don’t worry.”

Joe’s eyes were already blown out, dark and glassy. “Fuck.” 

Nicky grinned and got back to work, drooling down obscenely so he could stroke Joe easily. 

His feelings about faith went back and forth through the long years, but one thing stayed constant: this was worship, having Joe in his mouth and in his hand, underneath him. It was the purest kind of religion Nicky had ever been part of. They would have called those thoughts blasphemous in his first life, and no doubt they were. 

He had  _ this _ . Blasphemy didn’t bother him. Obviously whatever god was in control of his life felt he was worthy of a reward. The greatest reward this world could give. 

Joe’s warning proved true: he came after only a few minutes, a strangled gasp the only warning. Nicky swallowed him down, thrilling in the sensations, and licked him clean until Joe grasped at his hair, too sensitive. He tasted the same, salty and rich and thick on Nicky’s tongue.

Nicky pulled back, licking his swollen lips proudly as he looked up at Joe. 

Joe was wrecked, flushed and panting, eyes dazed. He heaved a breath when Nicky met his eyes, reaching down to brush a thumb along his lower lip. “You.” He stopped and swallowed, catching his breath. “You always know.”

Nicky nodded. Through all these centuries, of course he knew. He knew like he could crawl inside Joe’s skin and feel everything he felt. 

He soothed his hands down Joe’s thighs, stretching up on his knees to kiss Joe softly, sharing the taste of him. His own cock was painful, swollen and trapped in denim that had been too tight even before Joe had come in his mouth. 

Nicky reached down to adjust himself.

Despite being locked in their kiss still, Joe caught Nicky’s wrist. “I’ll take care of you,” he said against Nicky’s mouth. 

Nicky made a helpless sound against him, licking into Joe’s mouth as his hands went back to Joe’s thighs to wait. 

Joe broke away after another languorous few moments, smoothing Nicky’s hair away from his face. His eyes were warm, peaceful. Adoring. 

Nicky could only hope his own feelings were as obvious.

“Stand up,” Joe instructed him with a smile. 

God, that teasing in his eyes. That warm desire. It had been too long. Nicky pushed gracelessly to his feet, wincing at the drag of his jeans against his erection.

Joe made a sympathetic noise. “Poor Nicolò, let’s take care of this first.” His hands were careful, gentle, as he unfastened Nicky’s jeans and pulled the zipper down around his cock. 

Nick couldn’t help a sign of relief, almost a moan. 

Joe looked up at him, and something in his eyes flashed. He tugged jeans down, and then the dark briefs Nicky preferred, and he spoke with a sudden intensity. “Soon I will take my time with you, Nicky. I’ll get to know every inch of you again from scratch with my hands and my tongue. I’ll tell you how radiant you are, how much I love all of you. But for now,” he finished as he nudged Nicky to step out of his clothes, “I need you inside me. I need it like I need air to breathe.” 

Nicky nodded, feeling breathless. “Everything I am is yours, my heart.” 

Their gazes met, and Nicky had to deal with the odd contrast that ruled his life lately: this deep, deep love that was, as Joe said, as intrinsic as breathing, along with the sorrow that someone had hurt him. Had hurt  _ Joe _ .

Joe directed Nicky to the bed, ordered him to sit back against the headboard. And, with the completely unselfconscious physicality he had always had, Joe crawled to meet him, knees straddling Nicky’s thighs. He held himself up, reaching behind himself to find Nicky’s cock and grasp it, holding it. 

Nicky opened his mouth to object - it had been too long, this was much too fast, and if he saw pain in Joe’s eyes in this moment he might never stop weeping - but he felt the slickness of lube against his cockhead, and he realized. 

He chuckled, though the lust that slammed through him made the sound thick. “This is what you were doing in the bathroom for so long?” 

Joe just smiled, eyes narrowed in concentration. He lowered himself carefully, apparently no more interested in feeling pain than Nicky was in causing it. 

Nicky reached for him, filled his hands with Joe’s lush ass, holding him open. His eyes fluttered closed as Joe took him in, slow and steady. That tight heat he had known for centuries wrapped around him, tight enough to feel like suction. 

He moaned, head dropping back against the headboard. “Yusuf. Caro mio.” 

Joe didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to breathe. His thighs were steel as he lowered himself, his eyes black and blown out. 

Only when he was seated fully, when Nicky’s cock was encased in his heat, did Joe sigh. He licked his lips, eyes focused on nothing as he stayed perfectly still. 

Nicky had no complaints. He was in just as much danger of coming too fast as Joe had been. 

Joe’s eyes slowly focused, meeting Nicky’s. “Next time I think life is a dream, let’s go right to doing this. This...this is when I feel most alive.” 

Nicky leaned in, unable to stop from kissing him, a reverent kiss that, at both of their urging, grew desperate and wild. 

Nicky kissed Joe until the taste of his husband was the only flavor he remembered. He kissed Joe until his lips were hot and swollen, until Joe’s beard had rubbed Nicky’s cheeks and chin to redness. Until the throbbing in his cock, despite Joe’s stillness, was threatening to spill him over.

Only then did he choke out, “Joe. Please.”

Joe smiled, and moved. Slow, as if the actual fucking was incidental. He rolled his hips decadently, letting them both lose themselves in every sensation, the wet slide of Nicky thick inside of Joe, the clutch of Joe’s body tight and hot around Nicky.

Alive. Sacred. Nicky felt a moment’s pity for Andy and the others: after this he was not going to be able to keep his hands off Joe. They were about to become very, very annoying. 

When Joe was panting with every push, Nicky reached between them and stroked his cock. Their heads rested together, breathing in each other’s groans and gasps, and it was perfect.

Nicky came first, damn near sobbing as he pulsed with pleasure deep inside of Joe. Joe whimpered, and only moments later spilled into Nicky’s hand. 

They took their time, let themselves return to their senses slowly. Joe kissed Nicky’s mouth, his cheeks, the tracks of escaped tears. Nicky grasped him and held him close, and just the feeling of skin against skin was heady. 

Joe drew back enough to trace Nicky’s face with his fingertips, to push sweaty hair from his face and admire him openly. It had taken Nicky decades to be able to accept that admiration, and now it thrilled him. 

“Can we stay like this until we’re ready to do it again?”

Nicky hummed. He had maybe never felt this purely happy in his long life. “Only if we can switch places at least once before our roommate returns in the morning.”

Joe beamed. 


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mea culpa forever for taking so long for such an anticlimactic ending. I have been through the trenches, between work and school and covid. 
> 
> Anyway. Here. Love you guys. I promise I won't start posting my next one until it's already done and I don't have to leave anyone hanging. 
> 
> Still. A finished story! Go me!

It wasn’t an unusual time for them, all in all. 

They weren’t on vacation, but they weren’t in any active danger, and it showed that morning when Joe managed to wake up and get out of bed without Nicky stirring. Nicky only slept deeply when he felt safe, and even then only rarely. 

It was a good thing, Joe knew, after the few weeks they’d had preceding it. 

They always had good times and bad times, of course. They had experienced the best of the world and the worst, found themselves living in luxury with every protection or thrown into foxholes being killed three different ways at a time. 

They had lived through much harder weeks before, but maybe they were finally getting old because that one most recent bad-but-not-so-bad week had hit Joe and Nicky hard. 

He managed to get coffee ready, brush his teeth, get dressed, all before Nicky started to stir. Joe paused then, at the stirring, shirt half buttoned, savoring the rarity of watching Nicky wake up. He smiled to himself as Nicky rolled onto his back and his face immediately crumpled in displeasure. His eyes only opened after his hand came out and swatted at the mattress beside him and found it empty. 

Nicky looked over to where Joe should have been, his entire face creased in sleepy but wide-awake worry.

Joe cleared his throat through his smile. “Always so lazy, Nicolò.” 

Nicky’s eyes found him instantly, and he relaxed even as he scowled. “This is the...what? The _ seventeenth  _ morning you have woken before me. In a thousand years.” 

“Sixteenth,” Joe said with a grin. “That time in Venezuela I never actually went to sleep.” 

Nicky rolled his eyes, but reached out a hand with uncharacteristic laziness, not stirring otherwise. “You have plans today?”

Joe approached and grasped his hand, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I thought I’d run a few errands, pick up some presents.” 

Nicky smiled. “Presents. In town here?” 

“No, I’ll drive into Truro.”

“So far?”

“I’ll just be a few hours. You’ll have some lunch, read some, you won’t even miss me.”

“Shall we bet money on that?”

Joe laughed. He brought Nicky’s hand to his mouth and pressed his mouth to the sleep-warmed skin at his wrist. “Find a new hobby, amore mio. You are a lousy gambler.” 

“This one is a sure victory, I think.” Nicky smiled, raising an arm to tuck under his head. “Well, go if you’re going. Bring me something nice.” 

Joe grinned. He had plans there: it felt like they weren’t going to leave this particular safehouse for another few weeks, since working with Nile was going so well, so he had researched. There was a spa in Truro, he wanted to get Andy some services since her body now ached in ways she hadn’t experienced in thousands of years. A couple of museums he wanted to check out for Nile, and for Nicky, theatre and a brewery that did tours. He wanted to arrange a weekend for them all, let them finally wash away the rest of the month for good. 

He had a list of places to go, and normally he might have invited Nicky so that they could surprise their family together, but he figured Nicky deserved a treat, too. 

He leaned in and pressed a kiss to Nicky’s forehead. “Don’t get up until I’m gone. I like to think of you lazy in bed waiting for me.” He set his half-finished coffee on the bedside table, since that would be Nicky’s greatest motivator to get up. 

Nicky lay back, taking his hand back with an imperious wave. “A few hours.” 

Joe left him just like that, cheerful and warm and in their bed, like a thousand times in their pasts. And, like every one of those other times, he knew the entire time he was gone would be spent wishing he was back at Nicky’s side.

* * *

Andy took one look at Joe and Nicky as they came through the door and groaned, low and long. “Oh, god. I’m leaving. I’m retiring to Basque country to live out my mortality.” 

Joe just grinned at her, feeling like a new man entirely. “We’ll miss you, boss.” 

She glared at him, but her eyes moved over his face, and Joe could see her approval. Relief, even. 

Nicky, who hadn’t taken his hand from its proprietary spot at Joe’s back, tried to look innocent. “Should we have a farewell party, or..?”

“I hate both of you.” She sighed. “Get in here and sit down, we’ve got a lot to do today.” 

‘A lot to do’ was relative, luckily. They had to break back into the home of the DHS head and upload their newly faked videos in place of his original files, and Copley wanted to stage a photo shoot. 

“We work with some great special effects people, who all sign very thorough NDAs. We’re going to load Joe down with most of the injuries Kozak left on him after their first few hours together, and have him play dead in a London alley so we can get it on film.” 

“She slit his throat,” Nicky pointed out, pressing close to Joe’s side. “More than once, right from the start.” 

“Not anymore, not on our version. She slices him on the neck and chin but doesn’t get that deep, at least once you see through the ‘effects’ of the real footage. We’ll leave enough scars to sell the story. I’ve drawn up a chart.” 

“Oh, a chart.” Joe grinned. 

The idea maybe should have rattled him more, but he was unstoppable today. He’d woken up in bed with his husband, both of them sated and weary, glowing from the deep sleep that came after a whole handful of explosive orgasms. Nicky had been awake before Joe and had been watching him, and Joe hadn’t seen Kozak or that lab in his eyes, not in the slightest. In Nicky’s eyes had been the joy of a man taking in his husband and regretting only that they had no time to roll around in bed one more time before the real world broke in. 

Joe felt revived. He wasn’t cured of his pain and his memories, but with Nicky at his side he could at least move away from it, step by step. 

“Nile, you come with me and Booker for the breaking and entering this time, you need to learn. Joe, Nicky, you’re with Copley to get these pictures. One day to do all this, and tomorrow…” Andy looked over at Copley. “How exactly are you gonna make this meeting happen at all?” 

Copley shrugged. “They started it: they looked me up, they came after me. Professionally, that’s rude, and it’s sloppy. I have the right to demand an explanation, and when they offer it up I’ll be able to access our proof that they came after one of their own for a ridiculous reason. That should be the end of that. Might take a few days, but you guys will be off the hook for it. Except you, Andy, but I won’t need you until I’ve had a few talks with these…” His lips pursed, but apparently he hadn’t yet spent enough time with them to give in to his vulgar side. “These jerks.” 

She shook her head, waving him off. “Just let me know. Diplomacy sounds exhausting.” 

“It is.” He smiled faintly. “But I’d rather solve this in conference rooms than on a battlefield.” 

Booker snorted. “You might be on your own there, in this crowd.” 

“I’m not surprised.” Copley looked around at them. “Just stay low and off the radar until I give the okay. And Joe…” He gestured at him, hesitant. “You’re going to need to be dead, at least for a little while.” 

“I expected as much. Kozak found the Joseph Jones ID anyway, it needs to be burnt.” 

“I’ll handle that, and get you a new one. Still, I suggest you avoid the UK and the States for a few years.” He studied him. “Are you open to the idea of changing your appearance?”

Joe sighed and turned mournful eyes to Nicky. “Time to shave.” 

Nicky nodded, eyes wide and wet. He reached out and stroked Joe’s beard. “I’ll miss him.” 

Joe grinned, flushing under his hand. “You’ll be here when he comes back.”

Nicky leaned in and kissed him lightly. 

“Wow. You guys are extra  _ you _ this morning, huh?”

Booker laughed at Nile’s comment, though he looked at Joe and Nicky without the old familiar sadness. “This is your first experience with this, isn’t it? You’re about to get an education in insufferable affection, young one.” 

Nicky drew in a sharp breath, but didn’t speak. Joe reached over and tapped on his thigh lightly, knowing what made him react. 

Joe had reached a kind of peace with Booker, but Nicky had to find his own. Until then, after the comments Nicky made in Merrick’s lab it was a dangerous thing for him to tease Joe and Nicky for their relationship.

Nicky finally spoke, his voice low and even. “Don’t worry, I plan to take my husband off somewhere once this is all over, where we shall be insufferable alone.” 

Booker’s grin vanished as if he’d just realized his mistake, but he didn’t say anything.

“That’s a good idea. You two need a break.” Andy smiled at them warmly before remembering herself and schooling the expression. “But first, we’ve gotta get through this.”

* * *

From the look on his face, Joe was enjoying himself.

From the look of every other part of him...Nicky wanted to throw up, or burst into tears, or run out there and scoop his husband up and take him somewhere far away. 

It made no sense: Nicky had watched as they put the makeup on him, as they used latex and fake blood. As they covered Joe’s half-dressed form with scars and blood and gaping, open wounds. As they greyed the skin of his face and smudged darkness under his eyes, until he looked truly, horribly  _ dead.  _

Nicky had watched the entire process. Why did it make him sick to his stomach, watching Copley pose Joe to lay lifeless among trash bins in this sunless alley? 

Well, he supposed that wasn’t a particularly hard question to answer: this was an image of what might have been. If Joe had found his mortality in the dozens - hundreds - of deaths he had suffered through alone, this might well have been his ending. 

Copley had a report he was working off of, a police report he had gotten into the system of the London Met, backdated to the week before Joe was found. A John Doe supposedly found in this alley they were posing Joe in. 

Copley was working with a couple of strangers, and though Nicky didn’t trust a single one of them with his husband’s life, they were quick and professional, and by all appearances very good at their jobs. 

Joe had been stripped down and put into a pair of scrubs that matched what Kozak had worn when Nicky killed her. Copley’s crew had consulted with him thoroughly, then started slashing at the pants, and ‘slashing’ at Joe with latex and makeup until he was very much a man who had died in the hands of an evil doctor. 

They posed him carefully, to a degree Nicky might have called ridiculous if he wasn’t entirely over his head with this whole thing. 

Joe looked like a man who died hard and was left there to rot days ago. It was sickening. Nicky might have called a halt to the whole thing if Joe didn’t take every break to grin and joke around with his grim-faced makeup artists. Joe being Joe, and charming to a fault, eventually they started grinning back, answering back and making him laugh more than once. 

When it was done to Copley’s satisfaction, he brought the camera to Nicky for approval.

Nicky could barely look at the pictures. Joe was ‘dead’, gaunt enough still to look withered, grey and bloody and limp. Nicky had seen death so many times before: death was graceless and ugly. These pictures were ugly. 

“They’re fine,” he said to get the camera out of his face. 

Copley shot him an apologetic look and moved to compare notes with his team instead.

Joe grabbed for the camera, and looked at it for a long time. 

Nicky approached him finally, since it seemed they were done. Joe was standing among the skips, bleeding and grey and grinning. Nicky had had his share of being unable to interpret Joe’s moods lately, so he approached carefully despite the smile. 

“How are you feeling?” he asked in his old Genoese dialect, aware of the too-close government agents.

Joe bit back his immediate answer. He looked down at himself, and his smile dimmed a bit but went no less genuine. “Oddly, I think this is...good. Helping. In some strange way.”

“Really?”

Joe gestured down at himself. “Copley based this around my injuries. This is what I ought to look like.”

“No.” Nicky’s protest was weak. He reached out and tugged at Joe’s hand. 

“The first day, he says. Only one day of so many. My entire arm should be gone, but they’ll do that afterward, some computer effect.” He started to scratch at his neck, but stopped before he could dislodge any of the latex or fake blood. “This is...it was real, Nicky. Everything that happened to me was real. Not a dream, not just a bad feeling keeping me up at night. She destroyed my body, over and over again, and this is…” 

He shrugged. Despite his words he was still smiling. 

Nicky thought he understood, in some distant way. They healed too fast. He’d been warned. He even knew, based on his own experiences, if not to this degree. He had felt the disconnect of it: pain and death, and unblemished skin ten minutes later. But not extended out the way Joe’s had been. Not hurting then healing then hurting again so many times in a row, week after week.

“It scares me to see you like this,” he confessed quietly. “But if it helps then I’m glad.”

“If our roles were reversed,” Joe agreed, “I wouldn’t be able to be here.” He leaned in as if he wanted a hug, a touch, but frowned down at the makeup all over him. “You are stronger than me, Nicolò.” 

Nicky shook his head, but didn’t bother to argue. 

Copley called Joe over, and Nicky hung back and watched. To his relief, Copley’s crew began to clean Joe’s face of makeup. 

He didn’t feel strong. Not stronger than Joe, by any means. He felt shaken down to his bones, still. It started the day Joe vanished, and though it was better now Nicky always seemed to be a thought or a glance away from feeling it all again. 

There was a part of him that felt weaker, having lived through this. Having experienced himself without Joe...it was like being tortured. A body didn’t become accustomed to pain: there would be no point in torture if a person simply adapted and was no longer susceptible. Instead, the more pain a person felt the more desperate they became to end it. Nicky felt desperate still. Desperate to insure that this never happened again.

Nicky wouldn’t be leaving Joe alone anytime soon. In a few weeks, or months, he might forget the trauma of sleeping alone and he would relax. Time was the only reliable eraser. 

There were no wise lessons to learn from all this. There was no moral here. They hadn’t been unsafe, hadn’t made any major mistakes they could learn from. Nicky hadn’t taken his husband for granted before now: he hadn’t, in their centuries together,  _ ever  _ taken Joe for granted. 

But that was the world. Their worlds, especially. War, endless war, as Joe had ranted the day before in his despair. Unreasonable, nonsensical. The wars they fought were rarely for their own reasons. There were no lessons there, either. Just death and pain and at the end of the day some hope that their presence had improved things. 

It felt useless. Suffering for nothing. Nicky had argued with Joe (mostly out of terror that Joe was giving up), but he understood the rage and frustration. He felt it himself, all the time. 

All he had learned from Kozak and her schemes was that if he was exposed to that despair and robbed of his husband at the same time, he would not survive. 

Not a revelation, really, as lessons went. Not worth the suffering. Not worth Joe’s torment, certainly. 

Still. He watched Joe dragging reluctant smiles out of those government agency makeup people as they peeled latex from his throat and chest, and he knew that even if this had been suffering without reason, they were on the other side of it now. 

* * *

“Whoa.” 

Joe grinned and rubbed his chin idly. “You like?” 

Nile gaped at him. “You look like a different person.” 

“That’s the point.” Andy was much less impressed as she took him in, but then she’d seen him most every way Nicky had, which was most every way he could possibly look. 

He always felt so young with a shaved face. His curls had been buzzed short at the same time, and his reflection looked about twenty years old to his critical eyes. Nicky had damn near been in tears as he did the shaving, but standing behind Joe in the mirror at the end, his eyes were as openly admiring as always. 

Which did a lot for Joe’s nerves, really. 

Nile kept staring. “Damn, Joe. I always think guys grow beards to hide weak chins or whatever, but. Damn. You’re hot.” 

Joe laughed, pleased. “I’m glad someone thinks so. Nicolò will not want me again for weeks.”

“A needless and cruel lie,” Nicky said as he emerged from the bathroom behind Joe. 

“Wipe the tears away before you say that,” Joe shot back at him, his smile broad enough to hurt.

He liked a beard, always preferred himself in one. But there was a relief in anonymity, after the last few months, and he really did look near unrecognizable. He could be someone else for a year or two, avoiding the UK and the US, traveling with Nicky, with their sisters. They could find peace, maybe. 

That was worth a beard. Hair grew back, like every other body part he lost but much less painfully. 

Nicky moved in behind him, hands sliding to Joe’s hips as he pressed in against his back. He leaned up to push a kiss against the back of Joe’s head, the fuzz of his now cropped hair. “You know you will never be less than perfect to me, stop fishing for compliments.” 

Joe beamed and leaned back against him, looking towards Andy. “Well? What else do we still have to do to end this mess?”

She shrugged. “It’s between Copley and the Americans now. And me, I suppose, if I have to get involved.” 

“Do we really trust Copley and his world this much?” Nicky spoke behind Joe. “We know this man who headed up Kozak’s work, yes? The American operative? We could still take care of this our way.” 

Joe bit back a smile. Nicky had his occasional bouts of bloodthirstiness, typically when someone was being particularly cruel to innocents. But apparently Joe being hurt inspired the same feeling. No real surprise there. 

Andy wasn’t surprised either. “Look, I hate this. I’ve hated it from the beginning. This world...we can’t fight in it the same way we used to. We need to adapt, and part of that is learning from the people who know how it works. James has been upfront with us since the thing with Merrick. He knows that world. He is the only reason we found Joe.” 

“And the reason Joe went missing, indirectly,” Nicky argued, a pout in his voice. 

Joe leaned into his hands, soothing. “Well, if Joe is a major factor in this decision, then Joe should get an opinion, yes?” 

Nicky sighed against his neck. “Of course, amor mio.” 

“Then speaking for myself, I would like to sneak my shaved face off this accursed island with my husband, and trust that my sister and her secretive CIA accomplice will make sure I’m not marked for death longer than I have to be.” 

Nicky tensed a bit behind him. “We should talk about this,” he murmured into Joe’s ear. 

Joe tried not to shiver at the breath of words on his skin. “Nothing to talk about, Nicolò. As you told me, one more fight will do nothing to heal me, or to fix what’s already gone wrong. If Andy says to trust Copley and his underhanded world, I’ll do it. She’ll make sure he doesn’t go back on his word. She’ll keep us safe.” He looked back over his shoulder. “If you want to stay and see this through, and meet me later, I would give my full consent.”

Nicky’s head was already shaking, though. His fingers tightened at Joe’s waist.

Joe smiled faintly. “I want a rest, Nicky. I want one for both of us.” 

Nicky. Nicky was hurting more than he would admit. He had been expressive enough about his pain, but that didn’t cure it. Nicky had suffered weeks of fear and an empty bed, and his trauma had shown earlier that day, as he stood by so pale watching Copley’s people make Joe a corpse. 

Joe had thought more than once since he got back that Nicky had the worst part of the whole thing. Joe had suffered physically, but Nicky’s emotional pain had been beyond anything Joe had ever had to suffer. He could not have stood it. 

Nicky would never worry about himself more than Joe, so Joe had to worry for him. It was their way. 

Andy was right. It wasn’t the kind of fight they were used to. It was very unsatisfying. Nicky and Joe had been fighting their own wars for damn near a thousand years Never before had they been in this kind of position, where the danger was entirely out of their hands and the revenge would have to be as well. 

They had a lot to learn about the new world, the part that they had let slide while they taught themselves guns and drones and all the elements of war that still resembled the things they used to know. 

Copley and Nile would both help with that, and obviously the lessons were overdue. This whole thing, it had been a lesson in itself. 

Kozak was dead. Joe was alive. In the end, that would have to be the thing that mattered. They would learn the new wars fought by this new world, and they would all be alive to do it. 

Evolution. It was a bitch for an immortal, and these days change was exponential. Every decade in the last century and a half had brought so many new things that it was dizzying. They had only learned smartphones and tablets, now they had to take on government oversight and the surveillance state.

They had to catch up.

But later. 

Nicky’s hands were warm at his hips, his chest was a solid wall against which Joe could lean. Joe had much to recover from, and much to mourn. 

But, again, that could come later. They were together, as they had been for a millennium. 

There was no rush. 


End file.
